Masks and respirators to protect healthcare workers against respiratory viruses (research up to 10 November 2020)
Citation: Li J, Qiu Y, Zhang Y, et al. Protective efficient comparisons among all kinds of respirators and masks for health-care workers against respiratory viruses: A PRISMA-compliant network meta-analysis. Medicine. 2021;100(34):e27026.
Language: Abstract and full text only available in EN.
Free to view: Yes.
Funding sources: National Key R&D Program of China (2018YFC1002301).
What is this? Masks and respirators are worn by healthcare to reduce the transmission of respiratory viruses.
For this systematic review and network meta-analysis, the authors searched for studies of the effects of masks or respirators for protecting healthcare workers against respiratory infectious diseases in healthcare facilities. They restricted their searches to articles published in English and Chinese up to 10 November 2020. They included 32 studies: six randomized trials and 26 observational studies.
What was found: At the time of this review, there was no significant evidence of a difference between N95 respirators and medical masks for protecting healthcare workers from respiratory viruses, but low-quality evidence suggested that N95 respirators have a stronger protective effectiveness against coronavirus infections than medical masks.
Implications: The authors of the review recommend that healthcare workers wear N95 respirators in high-risk areas for coronaviruses (e.g., clinical SARS-CoV-2 settings) and medical masks in low-risk areas.
Other considerations: The authors of the review did not discuss their findings in the context of issues relating to health equity.
This summary was prepared by Rosemary James and edited and finalized by Mike Clarke.
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