Back

The Impact of Face-Masks on Total Mortality Heterogenous Effects by Gender and Age

de giorgi, g.; speziali, m. m.; Michalik, F.

2021-06-12 health policy
10.1101/2021.06.08.21258545 medRxiv
Show abstract

Governments around the world have been implementing several non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to fight Covid-19 spread and its associated mortality. We estimate the causal impact of mandatory face-mask wearing policy in public places on (total) mortality in Switzerland. We exploit the staggered introduction of the policy across Swiss cantons using a Difference-in-Difference and an event study approach. We find that the extension of compulsory mask wearing to public places has an heterogeneous impact on mortality, with small positive effects on male mortality entirely driven by older age-cohorts (90+). Finally, we show that adding contact tracing and stricter distancing to compulsory face-mask policy does not lead to better results in terms of mortality.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.