Wearing facemasks doesn’t stop the spread of the Covid-19 virus—and they don’t stop you catching it, an independent study has found.
Although mask-wearing was one of the key public health responses to stop the spread of Covid, they made “little or no difference”, researchers at the Cochrane Collaboration concluded after analysing 12 studies that had monitored more than 600,000 people. Two studies involved healthcare workers, who were wearing medical or surgical masks.
A far more effective strategy is frequent hand washing. As viruses can settle on surfaces, regular hand-washing and not touching your eyes, nose and mouth is far more likely to slow Covid’s spread, the researchers said.
