80,000 Hours Podcast With Rob Wiblin

It’s hard to believe, but until recently there had never been a large field trial that addressed these simple and obvious questions: 1. When ordinary people wear face masks, does it actually reduce the spread of respiratory diseases? 2. And if so, how do you get people to wear masks more often? It turns out the first question is remarkably challenging to answer, but it's well worth doing nonetheless. Among other reasons, the first good trial of this prompted Maha Rehman — Policy Director at the Mahbub Ul Haq Research Centre — as well as a range of others to immediately use the findings to help tens of millions of people across South Asia, even before the results were public. Links to learn more, summary and full transcript. The groundbreaking Bangladesh RCT that inspired her to take action found that: • A 30% increase in mask wearing reduced total infections by 10%. • The effect was more pronounced for surgical masks compared to cloth masks (plus ~50% effectiveness). • Mask wearing also led to an