ReviewLa Medicina del lavoro2020
Surgical masks vs respirators for the protection against coronavirus infection: state of the art.
Review in La Medicina del lavoro, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Trial
- Evaluation of N95 respirator and surgical mask application on intraocular pressure and superficial retinal vessel density in healthy subjects.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Article
- Learning from the Experience of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A New Paradigm for Occupational Biohazard Assessment and Management.La Medicina del lavoro · 2023Article
- Factors Associated with SARS-CoV-2 Infection before Vaccination among European Health Care Workers.La Medicina del lavoro · 2023Article
- Bioburden Variation of Filtering Face Piece Respirators over Time: A Preliminary Study.Materials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- One year of surgical mask testing at the University of Bologna labs: Lessons learned from data analysis.Separation and purification technology · 2022Article
- Article
- Practical measures for SARS-CoV-2 infection prevention.The Lancet. Infectious diseases · 2022Article
- COVID-19: a further step forward in the long journey of Occupational Medicine.La Medicina del lavoro · 2021Article
- Determinants of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Italian healthcare workers: a multicenter study.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Challenges and Controversies in COVID-19: Masking the General Population may Attenuate This Pandemic's Outbreak.Frontiers in public health · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundDuring the Covid-19 outbreak, a recurrent subject in scientific literature has been brought back into discussion: whether surgical masks provide a sufficient protection against airborne SARS-CoV-2 infections.
objectivesThe objective of this review is to summarize the available studies which have compared the respective effectiveness of surgical masks and filtering facepiece respirators for the prevention of infections caused by viruses that are transmitted by the respiratory tract.
methodsThe relevant scientific literature was identified by querying the PubMed database with a combination of search strings. The narrower search string "(surgical mask *) AND (respirator OR respirators)" included all the relevant articles retrieved using broader search strategies. Of all the relevant articles found, seven systematic reviews were selected and examined.
resultsThe currently available scientific evidence seems to suggest that surgical masks and N95 respirators/FFP2 confer an equivalent degree of protection against airborne viral infections. DISCUSSION: Since surgical masks are less expensive than N95 respirators but seem to be as effective in protecting against airborne infection and they are also more comfortable for the user, requiring less respiratory work, they should be the standard protective device for health care workers and especially for workers who carry out non-medical jobs. Filtering facepiece respirators, whose extended use is less comfortable for the wearer, may be preferred for procedures which require greater protection for a shorter time.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.