Deadly Covid-19 surges are painful reminders that we cannot let our guard down. If the virus travels into rural South Asia with the same vengeance with which it hit Indian cities, the devastation we are currently seeing will pale in comparison to the pain and suffering that rural residents will have to endure. With comparatively poor access to hospital beds and oxygen tanks, rural health systems will get overwhelmed much faster. Widespread vaccination coverage is still months away in those areas, so our best line of defence remains preventative strategies, like masks, to stem the flow of Covid.
Getting people to wear masks consistently is no easy task. Both BRAC and Yale University researchers have independently tracked mask-wearing across Bangladesh for months, and it has never remained stable. So a team from Yale, Stanford, the NGOs Innovations for Poverty Action and Green Voice, in partnership with a2i and BRAC, set out to rigorously identify how to change community-wide mask-wearing norms.