{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"80,000 Hours Podcast","title":"#114 – Maha Rehman on working with governments to rapidly deliver masks to millions of people","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":6175,"description":"It’s hard to believe, but until recently there had never been a large field trial that addressed these simple and obvious questions: \r\n\r\n1. When ordinary people wear face masks, does it actually reduce the spread of respiratory diseases? \r\n2. And if so, how do you get people to wear masks more often? \r\n\r\nIt turns out the first question is remarkably challenging to answer, but it's well worth doing nonetheless. Among other reasons, the first good trial of this prompted Maha Rehman — Policy Director at the Mahbub Ul Haq Research Centre — as well as a range of others to immediately use the findings to help tens of millions of people across South Asia, even before the results were public. \r\n\r\nLinks to learn more, summary and full transcript.\r\n\r\nThe groundbreaking Bangladesh RCT that inspired her to take action found that: \r\n\r\n• A 30% increase in mask wearing reduced total infections by 10%. \r\n• The effect was more pronounced for surgical masks compared to cloth masks (plus ~50% effectiveness). \r\n• Mask wearing also led to an increase in social distancing. \r\n• Of all the incentives tested, the only thing that impacted mask wearing was their colour (people preferred blue over green, and red over purple!). \r\n\r\nThe research was done by social scientists at Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford, among others. It applied a program they called ‘NORM’ in half of 600 villages in which about 350,000 people lived. NORM has four components, which the researchers expected would work well for the general public: \r\n\r\nN: no-cost distribution \r\nO: offering information \r\nR: reinforcing the message and the information in the field \r\nM: modeling \r\n\r\nBasically you make sure a community has enough masks and you tell them why it’s important to wear them. You also reinforce the message periodically in markets and mosques, and via role models and promoters in the community itself. \r\n\r\nTipped off that these positive findings were on the way, Maha took this program and rushed to put it into action in...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/VO1STE7hN95RRg9QdLo4soV2VhhbR9PF5ZZlRhDYcwE/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzQxNDAyLzE2ODM1/NDQ1NDAtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}