Controversial Danish study says face masks not effective in COVID-19 fight

NIRMAL YESODA

As the novel coronavirus continues to spread chaos in all nooks of the world, a new study conducted by a team of Danish researchers has found that face masks have no effect in controlling the spread of COVID-19. The new finding comes at a time when WHO is strictly advocating people to wear masks to contain the pandemic effectively.

The study which is known as the Danmask-19 trial was conducted in the Spring with more than 3,000 participants. During the time of this trial, the general public was not asked to wear masks as a precautionary measure to control coronavirus.

Out of the 3,000 participants, 1,500 people were given surgical masks. Researchers also made sure that these participants are changing these masks every eight hours. After one month, PCR tests were conducted on these 1,500 participants, and the results were compared with non-mask users.

The results were pretty surprising, as there was no significant difference between mask users and non-maskers when it comes to getting contracted with coronavirus. According to the study report, 1.8 percent of mask users were infected with coronavirus when compared to 2.3 percent of non-maskers.

According to the latest statistics, there are more than 50 million recorded coronavirus positive cases in the world. The pandemic which apparently originated from Wuhan, China has already claimed the lives of more than 1.4 million people worldwide.