According to another opinion piece this was a bad meta-analysis for policy on masks and SARS-CoV-2 transmission: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/2/22/2

According to another opinion piece this was a bad meta-analysis for policy on masks and SARS-CoV-2 transmission: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/2/22/23609499/masks-covid-coronavirus-cochrane-review-pandemic-science-studies-infection https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/2/22/23609499/masks-... "The review includes 78 studies. Only six were actually conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic" ... "Only two of the studies are about Covid and masking in particular." "Those studies that did take on Covid and masks directly often painted a different picture than the broader conclusions from the meta-analysis. One of the largest studies of mask-wearing during the Covid pandemic was conducted in Bangladesh, with more than 170,000 people in the intervention group and similar numbers in the control group. The authors studied a series of public announcements and mask distributions which raised the frequency of mask-wearing. In the end, around 40 percent of the experimental group wore masks, compared to around 10 percent in the control group. The result, the study found, was a substantial reduction in the share of people with Covid-19-like symptoms, and in antibodies that would suggest a Covid-19 infection: “In surgical mask villages, we observe a 35.3% reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence among individuals ≥60 years old ... We see larger reductions in symptoms and symptomatic seropositivity in villages that experienced larger increases in mask use.” That looks like pretty substantial evidence that mask-wearing reduces Covid-19! And this article is one of only two studies of mask-wearing included in the Cochrane review which happened during the Covid-19 pandemic."