Evaluating the Effect of Wearing Face Masks by the General Population on Mitigating the Spread of COVID-19

COVID-19 has emerged as a global pandemic that is affecting nations worldwide, with the number of global confirmed cases growing exponentially since March 2020. To mitigate the rapid spread of COVID-19, governments of many countries implement public health intervention. While these public health interventions have been recognized as effective measures to control the epidemic, there has been much debate about the usefulness of face masks in preventing further dispersal of COVID-19. We utilized the functional canonical correlation analysis (FCCA) method to analyze face masks intervention for the general public, and proposed an auto-encoder method to forecast the trend of the spread of COVID-19 for countries with and without face masks interventions. Our analysis showed that countries who implemented face masks interventions for the general population demonstrated statistically significantly better results for mitigating virus spread in terms of confirmed cases of COVID-19. Additionally our forecasting result indicated that if countries implement the wearing of face masks for the general population, the trend of COVID-19 will slow down and the end time of the pandemic will be sooner.