Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 623

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 8 of the 8 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Face masks for the public during the covid-19 crisis

Open access
Greenhalgh, Trisha, Schmid, Manuel B, Czypionka, Thomas, Bassler, Dirk, Gruer, Laurence·2020·BMJ

Abstract

Trisha Greenhalgh and colleagues argue that it is time to apply the precautionary principle The precautionary principle is, according to Wikipedia, “a strategy for approaching issues of potential harm when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking.” The evidence base on the efficacy and acceptability of the different types of face mask in preventing respiratory infections during epidemics is sparse and contested.12 But covid-19 is a serious illness that currently has no known treatment or vaccine and is spreading in an immune naive population. Deaths are rising steeply, and health systems are under strain. This raises an ethical question: should policy makers apply the precautionary principle now and encourage people to wear face masks on the grounds that we have little to lose and potentially something to gain from this measure?3 We believe they should. Evidence based medicine tends to focus predominantly on internal validity—whether primary research studies were “done right”—using tools to assess risk of bias and adequacy of statistical analysis. External validity relates to a different question: whether findings of primary studies done in a different population with a different disease or risk state are relevant to the current policy question. We argue that there should be a greater focus on external validity in evaluation of masks. A rapid search of the literature on the wearing of masks by the general public during epidemics or pandemics by a team at the University of Galway (E Toomey, personal communication, 29 March 2020) found five peer reviewed systematic reviews:

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1136/bmj.m1435

Cites

8 of 8 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 8 references

Research works printed but not linked: 17

  1. 10.1016/S2213-2600(20)30134-X · DOI · Paper page
  2. 10.21203/rs.3.rs-16701/v2. · doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-16701/v2
  3. 10.1111/jebm.12381 · DOI · Paper page
  4. 10.1017/S0950268809991658 · DOI · Paper page
  5. 10.1186/1471-2458-7-208 · DOI · Paper page
  6. 10.1101/2020.04.01.20049528 · doi:10.1101/2020.04.01.20049528
  7. 10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006577 · DOI · Paper page
  8. 10.1056/NEJMe2002387 · DOI · Paper page
  9. 10.1101/2020.03.05.20031815 · doi:10.1101/2020.03.05.20031815
  10. 10.1001/jama.2020.4958 · doi:10.1001/jama.2020.4958
  11. 10.1101/2020.03.12.20034660 · DOI
  12. 10.1038/s41591-020-0843-2 · DOI · Paper page
  13. 10.3201/eid1004.030628 · DOI · Paper page
  14. Nyei A-bI, 2016, Beyond the disease: how the Ebola epidemic affected the politics and stability of the Mano River Basin, Conflict Trends, 2, 12
  15. 10.1136/bmj.333.7570.701 · DOI
  16. Smith, 2006, Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials, Int J Prosthodont, 19, 126
  17. 10.1101/2020.03.30.20047217 · DOI

Cited by

See all 623

Metadata

Authors
Greenhalgh, T., Schmid, M. B., Czypionka, T., Bassler, D., & Gruer, L.
Venue
BMJ
Publisher
BMJ
Published
2020-04-09
Volume
369
Pages
m1435
ISSN
1756-1833 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3015840999
Cited by
623
References
8
FWCI
71.05
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze
Licence
www.bmj.com/company/legal-information/terms-conditions/legal-information/tdm-licencepolicy (tdm)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Face masks for the public during the covid-19 crisis. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1136/bmj.m1435
The paper
Greenhalgh, T., Schmid, M. B., Czypionka, T., Bassler, D., & Gruer, L. (2020). Face masks for the public during the covid-19 crisis. BMJ. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m1435

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.