ArticleRoyal Society open science2023
Understanding the role of mask-wearing during COVID-19 on the island of Ireland.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions as implemented in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic: a rapid review.Journal of public health (Oxford, England) · 2025Pooled it
- Excess respiratory, circulatory, neoplasm, and other mortality rates during the Covid-19 pandemic in the EU and their implications.Epidemiology and infection · 2025Article
- Non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce COVID-19 transmission in the UK: a rapid mapping review and interactive evidence gap map.Journal of public health (Oxford, England) · 2024Review
- COVID-19: did the masks work?Future microbiology · 2024Article
- Estimating time-dependent contact: a multi-strain epidemiological model of SARS-CoV-2 on the island of Ireland.Global epidemiology · 2023Article
- Understanding the role of mask-wearing during COVID-19 on the island of Ireland.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Non-pharmaceutical interventions have played a key role in managing the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is challenging to estimate their impacts on disease spread and outcomes. On the island of Ireland, population mobility restrictions were imposed during the first wave, but mask-wearing was not mandated until about six months into the pandemic. We use data on mask-wearing, mobility, and season, over the first year of the pandemic to predict independently the weekly infectious contact estimated by an epidemiological model. Using our models, we make counterfactual predictions of infectious contact, and ensuing hospitalizations, under a hypothetical intervention where 90% of the population wore masks from the beginning of community spread until the dates of the mask mandates. Over periods including the first wave of the pandemic, there were 1601 hospitalizations with COVID-19 in Northern Ireland and 1521 in the Republic of Ireland. Under the counterfactual mask-wearing scenario, we estimate 512 (95% CI 400, 730) and 344 (95% CI 266, 526) hospitalizations in the respective jurisdictions during the same periods. This could be partly due to other factors that were also changing over time.
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