Medpage November 18, 2020
I was drawn to science and medicine because of all human endeavors, ours is one where smart people can say, "I don't know." We don't stop there. We run a study or experiment that helps us know more. That is what makes what we do different than other human endeavors.
I start then with a humility as I take on the Danish Mask Study, published on Wednesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine. This is a 4,800-person randomized trial that took place in the spring and early summer in Denmark. The trial was run at a time where most Danes did not wear masks when they left their house. It told participants to practice social distancing and randomly assigned them with the advice to wear a mask (and even gave them 50 surgical masks), advising them to change it after every 8 hours of use, or gave them no advice to wear mask, and followed them to see how many acquired SARS-CoV-2 by PCR or antibody testing. The answer was a nearly identical proportion -- 42 of 2,393 people (1.8%) in the mask group and 53 of 2,470 (2.1%) in the no-mask group. The difference was not statistically significant.
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