The Impact of Community Masking on COVID-19: A Cluster-Randomized Trial in Bangladesh Jason Abaluck†;‡;1, Laura H Kwong†;2;3, Ashley Styczynski†;4 Ashraful Haque5, Md. Alamgir Kabir5, Ellen Bates-Jeffries6 Emily Crawford1, Jade Benjamin-Chung7, Shabib Raihan5 Shadman Rahman5, Salim Benhachmi8, Neeti Zaman5 Peter J. Winch9, Maqsud Hossain10, Hasan Mahmud Reza11, Abdullah All Jaber10, Shawkee Gulshan Momen10, Faika Laz Bani10, Aura Rahman10, Tahrima Saiha Huq10, Stephen P. Luby §;2;4, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak §;1;12 * August 31, 2021 Summary: A randomized-trial of community-level mask promotion in rural Bangladesh during COVID-19 shows that the intervention tripled mask usage and reduced symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections, demonstrating that promoting community mask-wearing can improve public health. *‡ Address correspondence to
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[email protected]. † denotes co-first author, § denotes co-last author. Author affiliations: 1. Yale School of Management, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA; 2. Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; 3. Division of Environ- mental Health Sciences, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA; 4. Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; 5. Innovations for Poverty Action Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh; 6. Innovations for Poverty Action, Evanston, IL, USA; 7. Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; 8. Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA; 9. Social and Behavioral Interventions Program, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA; 10. NGRI, North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh; 11. Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh; 12.