Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. Part 2 - Hand hygiene and other hygiene measures: systematic review and meta-analysis.

Lubna A Al-Ansary; Ghada A Bawazeer; Elaine Beller; Justin Clark; John Conly; Chris Del Mar; Elizabeth Dooley; Eliana Ferroni; Paul Glasziou; Tammy Hoffman; Tom Jefferson; Sarah Thorning; Mieke van Driel; Mark Jones

Three pairs of authors independently (TJ/EB, LA/GB, MJ/EF) to study data using a standard template that was developed and applied for previous versions of this Cochrane review, but revised to reflect our focus on RCTs and cRCTs only for this update. We resolved any discrepancies in the data extractions by discussion. We extracted and reported descriptions of interventions using the Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR) template [9] . We entered data on outcomes into RevMan software [10] and meta-analysed using the generalised inverse variance random-effects model. The random-effects model was chosen because we expected clinical heterogeneity due to differences in pooled interventions and outcome definitions, and methodological heterogeneity due to pooling of RCTs and C-RCTs. Where possible, we pooled estimates from C-RCTs accounting for clustering. Treatment effects were reported as risk ratios (RR) with 95% confidence interval