Our own scientists are saying now is not the time to be doing a controlled experiment on facemasks in the middle of an ongoing pandemic. We should be following other countries practices where they have infections under control. They all advocate their population to wear face masks.
News from a medical journal;
Prof Trisha Greenhalgh from the Nuffield department of primary care health sciences at the University of Oxford, and colleagues wrote a paper published by the British Medical Journal last week that argued in favour of “the precautionary principle”.
The standard level of scientific evidence is no good in this issue, she told the Guardian. Randomised controlled trials are the gold standard in drug development, but not appropriate to face masks in a pandemic, she said.
“The point is we have now got a hugely complex issue going on. The last thing we need is a controlled experiment. We need to follow the logic of complex systems,.”
Greenhalgh thinks the whole population of the UK should wear masks – just as they do in South Korea, where the epidemic curve is far lower than ours.