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| Science & Technology |
| Face masks for the public during the covid-19 crisis |
| 2020-07-20 |
| [The British Medical Journal‎] The precautionary principle is, according to Wikipedia, "a strategy for approaching issues of potential harm when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking." The evidence base on the efficacy and acceptability of the different types of face mask in preventing respiratory infections during epidemics is sparse and contested.12 But covid-19 is a serious illness that currently has no known treatment or vaccine and is spreading in an immune naive population. Deaths are rising steeply, and health systems are under strain. This raises an ethical question: should policy makers apply the precautionary principle now and encourage people to wear face masks on the grounds that we have little to lose and potentially something to gain from this measure?3 We believe they should. ...Evidence based medicine tends to focus predominantly on internal validity—whether primary research studies were "done right"—using tools to assess risk of bias and adequacy of statistical analysis. External validity relates to a different question: whether findings of primary studies done in a different population with a different disease or risk state are relevant to the current policy question. We argue that there should be a greater focus on external validity in evaluation of masks. What they mean by this, is that the "evidence" re efficiency of masks is not from CV-19 but other viruses - ones with completely different parameters. Rest at the link |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |