Study on masks vs N95 respirators for health workers spurs concerns

*medical masks

I'm mentioning it because my first thought was "what, neck gaiters and bandanas actually have high effectiveness!?"

A study today in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggests that medical masks may offer similar effectiveness as N95 respirators in protecting healthcare workers (HCWs) exposed to COVID-19 patients in certain settings, but experts caution against that interpretation of the results.

HCWs were randomly assigned to wear either medical masks or a fit-tested N95 filtering facepiece respirator (FFR) for 10 weeks (the fit-testing protocol wasn't defined).

wide confidence intervals indicating a high degree of uncertainty, differences in self-reported adherence and baseline SARS-CoV-2 antibody status, and between-country differences in vaccination coverage and dominant circulating variants may have skewed the results

"The surgical masks were not statistically less effective than N95s in preventing COVID-19 infections in health-care providers looking after patients with COVID-19,"

*But the study was really poorly designed and every single CI crossed 1.0