Masks have not protected against Covid since at least 2022, according to a major study.
UK researchers reanalyzed data on the habits of more than 100,000 people and Covid test results during the pandemic.
They found that masks were linked to about a 30 percent lower risk of infections before February 2022, but the protective effect disappeared after that.
That’s when the Omicron variant took off and became dominant in the UK and that summer in the US, which researchers said made the virus too infectious for masks to prevent people from becoming infected.
Guidelines regarding masks have continually changed over the course of the pandemic as federal and local governments scrambled to establish mandates.
Some have criticized masks for hindering children’s schooling.
Professor Paul Hunter, lead author of the paper and an infectious diseases specialist at the University of East Anglia, told DailyMail.com that the results “almost certainly” apply to the United States.
“There is nothing inherently different about the UK that makes this a problem here and not in the US or anywhere else,” he said.
The main takeaway from the study is that “we can’t assume that things that worked in one part of the pandemic worked throughout the entire pandemic,” Dr. Hunter said.
“We need to remain vigilant and critically review the things we believed in in the early part of the pandemic, which intrinsically always remain the same,” he added.
While 2021 polls suggested that 64 percent of adults in the UK planned to continue wearing masks, in the US they have been slower to do so.
A 2023 survey found that only 12 percent of Americans typically wore a mask in public.
East Anglia research found that before Omicron BA.2, never wearing a mask was linked to a 30 per cent increased risk of contracting Covid in adults and a 10 per cent risk in children, contradicting other papers who found no increase.
Co-author Dr Julii Brainard, from UEA’s Norwich Medical School, said the results were “not entirely surprising” because Omicron spread more easily between people due to its greater ability to infect cells lining the tract. upper respiratory tract than previous variants.
Most people and even health professionals have stopped wearing masks, except for some people who are immunocompromised, elderly or concerned about their health.
And he added: “To prevent infections we need to have a good view of what factors may be more or less relevant.”
“If those factors can change, we need to be alert for that to happen.”
The researchers said the balance of evidence is that face masks reduce the transmission of respiratory infections in community settings and reduced the transmission of Covid-19, but the key question is to what extent.
The researchers analyzed data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Covid survey that took place in England and compared infection rates with an ongoing household survey of the population to determine how many people had infections.
Between November 2021 and May 2022, the survey also asked people about their habits to see if they were related to positive Covid test rates.
The researchers found that several risk factors for infections, such as wearing a mask, foreign travel history, household size, whether people were working or retired, and contact with children or those over 70, changed significantly. during the course of the pandemic.
In November 2021, always wearing masks at work, school or indoors was associated with a reduced risk of infection in both adults and children, but after the first wave of Omicron in the following months this was not the case.
Before Omicron BA.2, never wearing a mask was linked to a 30 percent higher risk of contracting Covid in adults and a 10 percent risk in children.
Dr. Anthony Fauci came under fire after admitting there is a lack of evidence to suggest wearing masks helped stop the spread of Covid.
In another investigation, researchers analyzed 78 studies involving more than one million people around the world. The results indicated that surgical masks reduced the risk of contracting “Covid or a flu-like illness” by just five percent, a figure so low that it may not be statistically significant.
It is possible that behavioral changes caused this change, the researchers said, as fewer people began wearing face coverings after Covid restrictions were lifted.
Reviews of the pre-pandemic evidence on face masks indicated that wearing masks could reduce the spread of Covid by around 19 percent, but these conclusions were based on data that was mainly before the emergence of the Omicron variants.
Children wearing face coverings were associated with a higher risk of testing positive early in the pandemic, and then were associated with a much lower or even no risk later in the pandemic.
Dr Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia and lead author of the study, told DailyMail.com that other research in the US has shown that School mask mandates only appeared to “delay and not prevent infections.”
Foreign travel was not associated with increased risk early in the pandemic, but was later.
The researchers believe that because Omicron was more infectious than previous variants, other interventions were no longer as effective, “thereby increasing the risk of infection in circumstances where the risk was previously relatively low.”