I don't know if that's true. Surgical masks are pretty good at stopping droplets but they only stop 80% of virus sized particles and that's really not good eno

I don't know if that's true. Surgical masks are pretty good at stopping droplets but they only stop 80% of virus sized particles and that's really not good enough for most medical use cases. It's a lot easier to teach new doctors and nurses "surgical masks don't protect you" than go into details. I expect health officials are just repeating the received wisdom which is close enough to true in their circumstances rather than deliberately being deceptive. People round off quantitative information to qualitative judgements all the time. Nate Silver still has people being angry at him for "Predicting Hillary would win" when he said at there was a 2/3 chance of that happening. It's such a pervasive phenomenon I don't see any reason to think it couldn't be happening here.