Face masks for the public during the covid-19 crisis
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Machine scores (provisional)
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
- Teacher spread
- 0.276 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
As the Covid-19 crisis deepens, some researchers have argued for the widespread routine use of face masks in community settings, despite acknowledged gaps in the evidence base for the effectiveness of such a measure. We argue that such calls are premature, and risk neglecting important potential harms and negative consequences, known and unknown. We identify potential unintended consequences at multiple levels, from individual-behavioural to macrosocial, and suggest that it is far from clear that the benefits of widespread uptake of face masks, whether encouraged or enforced by public authorities, outweigh the downsides. Finally, we make the case for caution in communicating unequivocal messages about the scientific evidence for face mask use to policy, practitioner and public audiences, given continued scientific disagreement on the question
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- BMJ
- Topic
- Infection Control and Ventilation
- Field
- Medicine
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- Economic and Social Research CouncilNational Institute for Health and Care ResearchUniversity of GlasgowUniversity of AlbertaWellcome Trust
- Keywords
- Face (sociological concept)Unintended consequencesFace masksCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)2019-20 coronavirus outbreakScientific evidenceMEDLINEPublic health
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes