A Nationwide Mask Mandate Could Add $1 Trillion To The US GDP, According To UCLA Analysis

A Nationwide Mask Mandate Could Add $1 Trillion To The US GDP, According To UCLA Analysis A mask mandate, combined with complementary public health measures, could have a $1 trillion impact on the U.S. GDP, says UCLA study. tomt Deadline

Implementation of a nationwide mask mandate, combined with complementary public health measures, could reduce the coronavirus’ spread to essentially zero and have a potential $1 trillion impact on the U.S. GDP, according to researchers at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

The team’s research “makes clear that even as vaccines are developed and new variants, like B.1.7.7, are being discovered, the power to protect ourselves remains in our hands, as individuals,” said Anne Rimoin, a UCLA Fielding School professor of epidemiology who co-authored its report.

“Wearing a mask is one of the simplest, most effective and cheapest ways to do exactly that — and it’s been proven by the history of epidemiology over the past century, going back to the 1918-19 influenza pandemic and even before,” she said. ...

Reducing disease spread requires two things: limiting contacts of infected individuals via physical distancing and other measures and reducing the transmission probability per contact,” said co-author Christina Ramirez, a Fielding School professor of biostatistics. “The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts.”

The findings — published in the January edition of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal — were the work of an international team of 19 specialists from UCLA and more than a dozen other universities and research centers, including Oxford University, the University of Cape Town, Peking University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of San Francisco.

R0, pronounced “R naught,” is a mathematical term that indicates how contagious an infectious disease is. It’s also referred to as the reproduction number. As an infection is transmitted to new people, it reproduces itself. Reducing reproduction to zero, in turn, could add $1 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product, the authors said. ...

The researchers came to a variety of conclusions, including:

• masks were 79% effective in preventing transmission, if they were used by all household members prior to symptoms occurring;
• the use of masks was strongly protective, with a risk reduction of 70% for those that always wore a mask when going out;
• transmission was 7.5 times higher in countries that did not have a mask mandate;
• the difference between U.S. states with mask mandates and those without found that the daily growth rate was 2 percentage points lower in states with mask mandates, estimating that the mandates had prevented 230,000 to 450,000 COVID-19 cases by last May 22;
• face masks have a large reduction effect on infections and fatalities, with a potential impact on U.S. GDP of $1 trillion if a nationwide mask mandate were implemented...