Dr. Tsion Firew, an emergency physician at Columbia University who wasn’t involved in the work, cautioned that the links between masking and milder disease haven’t yet been proved as cause and effect. Even so, the new paper “reiterates what we say about masks,” she said. The more virus in this nasal plume, they found, the likelier the participants were to get infected and experience symptoms. Wearing a face covering doesn’t make people impervious to infection, but these trends of asymptomatic cases could suggest that masks lead to milder disease, potentially reducing hospitalizations and deaths. But on another vessel that left Argentina in March, and on which all passengers were issued surgical masks after someone onboard came down with a fever, the level of symptomatic cases was below 20 percent.

Source: New York Times July 27, 2020 19:39 UTC