Universal use of face masks for success against COVID-19: evidence and implications for prevention policies

A debate is taking place on the use of face masks (both cloth and surgical) as a prevention tool in the community vis à vis the recent World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations. To shed light on this important topic, we reviewed relevant literature, focusing on the keywords “infection control”, “prevention”, “masks”, “respirators”, “viral infections” and “COVID-19”, without time restrictions to identify a minimum set of references from an electronic database (PUBMED), existing guidelines, viral diseases, airborne diseases and grey literature. Cloth masks are a simple, economic and sustainable alternative to surgical masks as a means of source control of SARS-CoV-2 in the general community <https://bit.ly/2x2xTL4> The article is part of the activities of WAidid (World Association for Infectious Diseases and Immunological Disorders), the Global Tuberculosis Network (GTN) and the WHO Collaborating Centre for Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases, Tradate (ITA-80, 2017-2020-GBM/RC/LDA).