Face masks have not caused people to get Covid-19 since February 2022, research shows

Face masks have not protected against Covid since 2022, according to a new study.

Researchers in Britain have reanalyzed data on more than 100,000 people’s habits and Covid test results during the pandemic.

They found that masks were associated with an approximately 30 percent lower risk of infections throughout 2021 – but the protective effect disappeared in February 2022.

That’s when the Omicron variant took off and became dominant in Britain, and that summer in the U.S., making the virus too contagious for masks to prevent people from becoming infected, according to researchers.

Some have criticized masks for hindering children’s education

Professor Paul Hunter, lead author of the paper and an infectious disease specialist at the University of East Anglia, told DailyMail.com that the results “almost certainly” apply to the US.

“There is nothing fundamentally different about Britain that would make this a problem here and not in the US, or anywhere else,” he said.

The main takeaway from the study is that “we cannot assume that things that worked in one part of the pandemic worked throughout the period,” Dr Hunter said.

“We must continue to monitor and critically assess the things we believed in in the early part of the pandemic so that they intrinsically always remain the same,” he added.

While surveys show most British adults are done with masks, they became highly politicized in the US.

A 2023 poll found that 12 percent of Americans were still wearing masks in public, and this is common in hospitals and doctor’s offices.

The East Anglia study found that before Omicron BA.2, never wearing a mask was linked to a 30 per cent increased risk of contracting Covid in adults and a 10 per cent risk in children, which contradicts other articles which found no increase.

Co-author Dr Julii Brainard, from UEA’s Norwich Medical School, said the results are ‘not totally surprising’ as Omicron was more easily spread among people due to its increased ability to infect the cells lining the upper respiratory tract than previous variants.

The majority of people and even healthcare professionals have stopped wearing face masks, barring some immunocompromised, elderly or health-anxious individuals.

She added: ‘To prevent infections we need to have a clear view of which factors are most or least relevant.

‘If those factors can change, we have to be alert to that.’

The researchers said the evidence is that face masks reduce transmission of respiratory infections in community settings and reduce transmission of Covid-19, but the key question is to what extent.

The researchers analyzed data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Covid survey taking place in England and compared infection rates with an ongoing household survey of the population to find out how many people had infections.

Between November 2021 and May 2022, the survey also asked people about their habits to see if they were linked to the number of positive Covid tests.

Researchers found that several risk factors for infections, such as wearing a mask, a history of foreign travel, household size, whether people were working or retired, and contact with children or people over 70, changed significantly over the course of the pandemic.

In November 2021, wearing face masks at all times at work, school or in enclosed spaces was linked to a reduced risk of infection in both adults and children, but after the first Omicron wave in the following months, this was not the case.

Before Omicron BA.2, never wearing a mask was associated with a 30 percent increased risk of contracting Covid in adults and a 10 percent risk in children.

Dr. Anthony Fauci faced criticism after admitting there is a lack of evidence to suggest wearing a mask has helped stop the spread of Covid

In other research, researchers looked at 78 studies involving more than a million people around the world. The results indicated that surgical masks reduced the risk of contracting ‘Covid or a flu-like illness’ by just five percent – a figure so low it may not be statistically significant

It is possible that behavioral changes caused this change, the researchers said, as fewer people started wearing face coverings after Covid restrictions were lifted.

Reviews of pre-pandemic evidence on face masks indicated that wearing masks could reduce the spread of Covid by around 19 percent, but these conclusions were drawn based on data mainly from before the emergence of Omicron variants.

Children wearing face coverings were associated with an increased risk of testing positive early on during the pandemic, and then associated with a much lower or no risk later in the pandemic.

Dr. Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia and lead author of the study, told DailyMail.com that other research in the US has shown that Mask mandates in school only seemed to “slow infections, not prevent them.”

Traveling abroad was not associated with an increased risk at the beginning of the pandemic, but later it was.

The researchers believe that because Omicron was more contagious than previous variants, other interventions were no longer as effective, “increasing the risk of infection in circumstances where previously the risk was relatively low.”