The COVID pandemic is now in the past. We know a lot about it, like how well our countermeasures worked because of studies.
Dozens of scientists from all over the world put together a huge metastudy of our efforts to fight COVID and the flu, and the results were published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
The authors looked at 78 different studies to see how effective different measures were, like masking, moving away, screening, quarantining, and washing hands. How did these actions stop the flu, COVID, and other viruses from spreading?
Different kinds of studies were included. They talked about times when transmission was high and times when it was low. They talked about both rich and poor countries, schools in the suburbs and schools in the city, hospitals and villages.
The most important thing was what they both had: All of the studies were either randomised controlled trials or cluster-RCTs. These are the best kind of studies because they have the best chance of not being messed up by other things. Non-randomized, non-controlled trials, like observational studies, can be messed up if, for example, more people start wearing masks at times or places where the rate of spread is already high, or if people who wear masks also wash their hands more often.
So, what did the research say?
First of all, washing your hands helped stop the spread of these illnesses. That shouldn’t be a surprise.
But here’s what surprised me the most: “Wearing masks in public probably doesn’t change the outcome of influenza-like illnesses or COVID-19-like illnesses much, if at all.” In other words, masks didn’t do much, if anything at all.
It’s possible that a community could slow the spread of a disease if everyone wore high-quality, well-fitted masks like N-95s or respirators, but there’s no proof that it does.
Think back to late 2020 or early 2022, when mayors, governors, school districts, and even the U.S. Department of Transportation and Joe Biden made people, especially children, wear masks even though the spread of the virus was very low.
When public health workers told us to wear masks early on, they were just being safe. But as time went on, officials switched from asking people to making them wear masks, even though it was becoming less clear that masks worked.
They didn’t just give orders, though. They called anyone who didn’t follow their orders “selfish grandma-killers.” The mayors and county executives who made people wear masks knew that they didn’t work because they didn’t wear them themselves in the same situations where they were making people wear them.
What happened in the past really happened. The people who wanted to make masks mandatory in 2020 had a good reason. The people in charge in 2023 don’t. Today, they should all come clean and explain why they did the things they did wrong.
If the people who made the mask rule don’t explain where they went wrong, they lose any authority and credibility they still have.
