Impact on hospital admissions and death rates
Supplementary Table 1 showed that, based on data from the ONS and NHS England, that the average rate of hospitalisation (reduced by 50% to remove hospital and care home admissions, as justified in the Methods section) over the previous week was 0.9% of community infections. Deaths in hospital, when linked to hospital admissions recorded over the prior 2 weeks, were found to be 8.2% of these admissions.
When the R-value was 0.8, with face-covering effectiveness at 40%, average community hospital admissions fell from 86/week to 78/week and community infected hospital deaths fell from 7.0/week to 6.4/week (Table 2).
If R rose and stayed at 1.0, then expected average community-derived hospital admissions would be 265/week and 40% effective face coverings would reduce this by 36/week and reduce possible expected hospital deaths from 22/week to 19/week (Table 2).
The above findings can be put into the context that the ONS30 reported 93% of adults had worn face coverings when shopping in the seven days to 21st August 2020. Furthermore, NHS England31 reported that there were 102,000/week all-cause hospital emergency admissions in England in June 2020 down 27% on the previous year and there were a total of 8,900 reported deaths by the ONS32,33 in the week ending 7th August of which 3,430 occurred in hospitals.