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The CDC, US Surgeon General, and WHO have all claimed with a straight face that masks don't protect you from getting the virus. I guess that's why they didn't

The CDC, US Surgeon General, and WHO have all claimed with a straight face that masks don't protect you from getting the virus. I guess that's why they didn't see any value in stockpiling them. /s

ashtonkem 7y ago
I too assume that surgeons wear those masks for funsies. Of course the “masks don’t work” was pure, transparent, bullshit from the very beginning. It didn’t even pass the smell test. Now if the argument was “please save masks for healthcare workers first, they’re higher risk” that would be fine. But “they don’t work”? Fuck off. Edit: I’m referring to the CDC here, not you personally, dear HN commenter.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  If you tell people to save masks for healthcare workers... then the hoarding would have been worse. At least by telling people masks don't work... peer pressure would keep them from buying them?
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    It doesn’t look like anyone bought it, masks still sold out quickly and health care providers are still reusing N95 masks. And in exchange the CDC spent a large amount of their credibility; a real lose lose.
    - PopePompus 7y ago
      That's because the lies were so transparent. In the US we were told (by our wonderful Surgeon General) that citizens who wore masks were actually more apt to get covid than persons without masks.
    - hsitz 7y ago
      I'm curious, was the official word always that even N95 masks didn't protect the wearer? Or just that "masks" in general (i.e., lesser masks) would not protect wearers?
      - Consultant32452 7y ago
        https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321... Here he claims masks (general) do not protect you. But they do protect healthcare workers. It amazes me that he was willing to put two such contradictory claims in the same tweet. It was just such a transparent lie. Given the context and implication, I think it is referring to "medical" grade masks including N95, surgical masks, etc.
        ashtonkem 7y ago
        I’m genuinely not sure what makes me angrier: the lie, or how fucking lazy it was. The least he could do is come up with something that’s at least plausible.
        Consultant32452 7y ago
        Look at how effective it is. Even still in this thread.
        ashtonkem 7y ago
        You have a depressingly good point.
      - dreamcompiler 7y ago
        N95 masks protect healthcare workers because HC workers know how to properly fit them; the general public does not have this training and thus N95 masks are wasted on the GP. Another part of the confusion is that early on (six weeks ago) the assumption was that the virus spread like the flu, i.e. via droplets from coughing and sneezing. Masks alone (without face shields) are of little benefit for droplet-spread disease because they don't protect your eyes. Now we know the virus spreads via aerosols which are generated by talking or even breathing. Cloth masks do indeed help for aerosols by trapping virus particles electrostatically and by increasing humidity, both of which keep the virus out of your respiratory tract. Or so the latest thinking goes. Hanlon's Razor applies, but this virus is also an insidious bastard that behaves very differently from what public health experts had expected.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - eli 7y ago
    I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I’m certain that lying to the public about what they can do to stop the virus was a bad call and will have lasting harm.
    - ooobit2 7y ago
      Not just a bad call, the lack of ownership by Democrats and their half-working-on-the-issue, half-keeping-the-Trump-tabloid-train-moving throughout all of this contributed significantly to the overall failure, and has played a huge role in us reaching Great Depression-era economic status. Every overblown executive order, news report, today-people-are-dangerous, tomorrow-we're-readying-to-reopen. Lying was just phase one or two. We're up to phase six now.
    - loopz 7y ago
      We hear the same over the pond. The argument is that the masks may not be fit for purpose or be used incorrectly, thus might actually be more contagious as people will tend to touch their faces more often etc. The official stances are still that people need training in order to use masks correctly, and the masks must meet standards to protect the user. All masks may protect others to some degree though. "Masks work, don't work" are not cogent arguments. It's the same with plastic gloves. Their usage in ie. grocery stores etc. may not help as much as incorrect usage may work against the intention. Again the argument is that if you get your hands dirty, you know you need to wash your hands and might think twice before touching face. Even washing hands properly require some training. We've since learned that less extreme measures may be good enough once you have control, testing and tracking.
  - ramraj07 7y ago
    The problem is no one likes to look stupid, and this is one of the cases where anyone who can spell words together was able to see through the BS. Whether they are going to hoard it or not, the solution is not for an expert to lie to the public.
- lambdasquirrel 7y ago
  No one knows why the CDC issued the guidelines that they did. There's also fairly little doubt that the CDC in previous decades would've been smarter and better organized. A lot of the commentary about the matter is disingenuous. Of course they won't filter out all the infectious agents for all healthcare workers forever. It was a matter of risk mitigation, just as much as shelter-in-place is. Getting infected is a numbers game, as is the live-locking of available hospital capacity.
- tzs 7y ago
  Surgeons wear masks to protect the patient from droplets from the surgeon's nose and mouth, which otherwise could easily fall right into the patient's open wound.
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    which is still relevant for slowing down the spread of a respiratory virus.
- ardy42 7y ago
  > Of course the “masks don’t work” was pure, transparent, bullshit from the very beginning. It didn’t even pass the smell test. No, that's not true. Maybe the advice was wrong, but it wasn't "pure, transparent, bullshit." It was always clearly stated that N95s worked if worn properly, but there was a lot of debate if surgical masks would offer much protection or not (they're known to be inadequate for certain viruses). Especially early on, people didn't understand much about this virus, such as the particle sizes involved or if asymptomatic transmission was real or not. There were a lot of factors to weigh in the recommendation in an environment of uncertainty. > Now if the argument was “please save masks for healthcare workers first, they’re higher risk” that would be fine. They did make that argument: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cdc-says-americans-dont-have-to-wear-facemasks-because-of-coronavirus-2020-01-30 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cdc-says-americans-don... > Most people don’t know how to use face masks correctly, and a rush to buy masks could prevent the people who need them most — health care providers — from getting them, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a scholar at the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. > In fact the U.S. surgeon general recently urged the public to “STOP BUYING MASKS!” “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!,” wrote Surgeon General Jerome Adams on Twitter US:TWTR > But “they don’t work”? Fuck off. It's also pretty clear that they were right that tons of people in the general public don't know how to wear masks correctly. I don't go out much, but when I do there's always a bunch of fools wearing N95s improperly (not using both straps, bunching both straps together behind the head, not shaping the noise area to fit the face). I even see people wearing surgical masks improperly (e.g. not covering the nose, not shaping the nose area, not folding out the material to stretch from the nose to under the chin, etc.). There's also the issue that the general public is unlikely to follow the kinds of rigorous protocols that make N95s effective in a healthcare setting.
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    There are two core problems with your argument: 1) Wearing masks is a trainable skill. None of us know how to use condoms initially either, yet literally millions of Americans use them effectively yearly. 2) Masks don’t have to be worn with perfect correctness to produce an effect in aggregate. If mask usage was even 30% effective, this would drop R0 by roughly as much, which is a big freaking deal. The N95 vs surgical mask is a tricky balance to strike; of course N95 should be saved for those at the highest risk, and if you know your mask will be sprayed with virus droplets, extra precautions must be taken. But that’s much more relevant to medical workers, not those of us who want to reduce risk going to the grocery store.
- cycomanic 7y ago
  Actually surgeons wear the masks to protect the patient not themselves. That's very similar to what likely is the biggest benefit of widespread mask use, reducing the infectiosness of people.
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    It’s amazing how many people blindly repeat this as if it’s a good argument. It’s not a good counter argument at all. Stopping other people from catching something you might have is a fantastic reason to ask everyone to wear a mask during a pandemic. It’s actually probably the main reason you’d want to do so, from a public health perspective, because it helps you prevent asymptomatic thread. The idea that the surgeon general would beg everyone to not wear a mask is utter madness.
    - cycomanic 7y ago
      I completely agree with you, they make perfect sense from a public health perspective and it was a major fck up by most of the health organisations World wide to say they wouldn't (if intentional or not doesn't really matter). However I was replying to a comment that was implying surgeons are using them to protect themselves. That is just wrong. There are enough good arguments for masks, one does not need to make incorrect statements.
skylanh 7y ago
I initially started following the WHO, CDC, and a few other health related agency Facebook pages when this pandemic actually started to take off in North America (mid-March). I had to stop following the WHO and CDC Facebook pages because the value of information they were posting was so poor, I was IMHO better of not having access to it.
felipemnoa 7y ago
So was it a straight out lie or incompetence? I remember reading here in HN that a lot of the masks do not actually protect you from the infection. But rather what a mask does is that it stops YOU from spreading the infection if you are infected.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  I know it's hard to believe that the CDC et. al. would just blatantly lie to you. But consider that they were simultaneously saying that masks WOULD protect healthcare workers. Here's an example tweet where the surgeon general claims that masks do not protect regular people, but they do protect healthcare workers. This is obviously nonsensical, those two things can't both be true. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321... Additionally, the surgeon general has repeated this claim on live television as recently as a week ago. There is no way he's that incompetent.
  - fulafel 7y ago
    Healthcare workers are in all-day contact with COVID patients that have late stage symptoms (fluid in lungs) and they perform operations where fluids spray around. Of course do not / do protect are simplifications as the effects are not binary. This is needed for communicating with the public, the meaning was "don't help much" vs "make a significant difference". If the health authorities always used the precise and caveat-ridden language of medical journal papers in order to ensure each sentence is logically correct when interpreted literally, they wouldn't get any messages through. The guidance about public usage of masks has changed in a lot of countries because the guidance changed from "no evidence that it protects the public from infection enough to make difference in epidemic spread" to "let's take even the small benefit of reducing spray from the potentially infected mask wearers". It's a sensible change when the mask shortages let up. No need to fan the flames of lightly assuming malice from health authorities, it's a bad time for that.
    - Consultant32452 7y ago
toohotatopic 7y ago
Isn't this still technically almost correct? The surgeon's masks don't entirely filter the virus out of the air. However, they work for a society because they prevent the virus from spreading into the air from those who are already infected.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  The surgeon general disagrees with this claim. He claims that the masks do protect the healthcare workers. You can see the claim in this tweet, where he also claims that the masks don't protect you. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...
  - DrScump 7y ago
    the masks do protect the healthcare workers Because properly equipped healthcare workers are also wearing eye protection. SARS-CoV-2 will quite happily enter at the eyes; in fact, eyes are a bigger attack surface than nostrils. With respect to protection from SARS coronaviruses, wearing just a mask and no eye protection is like a hockey goalie wearing a helmet but no mask.
    - MagnumOpus 7y ago
      > like a hockey goalie wearing a helmet but no mask. An apt comparison -- a damage reduction by 66% using only a fabric mask is massively worse than a damage reduction by 95% using proper PPE and procedures. In fact, it leaves you 7 times more likely to get infected (get hurt by a puck). But if anyone tried to sell the NHL-watching public the line that "helmets don't help", they would be rightfully humiliated in public.
      - loopz 7y ago
        For a helmet to help, it needs to be fit for purpose, otherwise they're dangerous as people assume they provide safety. When found, copy-cat masks are destroyed at border control, as they also don't provide the benefits to contain contagion.

The CDC, US Surgeon General, and WHO have all claimed with a straight face that masks don't protect you from getting the virus. I guess that's why they didn't see any value in stockpiling them. /s

ashtonkem 7y ago

I too assume that surgeons wear those masks for funsies. Of course the “masks don’t work” was pure, transparent, bullshit from the very beginning. It didn’t even pass the smell test. Now if the argument was “please save masks for healthcare workers first, they’re higher risk” that would be fine. But “they don’t work”? Fuck off. Edit: I’m referring to the CDC here, not you personally, dear HN commenter.

WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
If you tell people to save masks for healthcare workers... then the hoarding would have been worse. At least by telling people masks don't work... peer pressure would keep them from buying them?
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  It doesn’t look like anyone bought it, masks still sold out quickly and health care providers are still reusing N95 masks. And in exchange the CDC spent a large amount of their credibility; a real lose lose.
  - PopePompus 7y ago
    That's because the lies were so transparent. In the US we were told (by our wonderful Surgeon General) that citizens who wore masks were actually more apt to get covid than persons without masks.
  - hsitz 7y ago
    I'm curious, was the official word always that even N95 masks didn't protect the wearer? Or just that "masks" in general (i.e., lesser masks) would not protect wearers?
    - Consultant32452 7y ago
      https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321... Here he claims masks (general) do not protect you. But they do protect healthcare workers. It amazes me that he was willing to put two such contradictory claims in the same tweet. It was just such a transparent lie. Given the context and implication, I think it is referring to "medical" grade masks including N95, surgical masks, etc.
      - ashtonkem 7y ago
        I’m genuinely not sure what makes me angrier: the lie, or how fucking lazy it was. The least he could do is come up with something that’s at least plausible.
        Consultant32452 7y ago
        Look at how effective it is. Even still in this thread.
        ashtonkem 7y ago
        You have a depressingly good point.
    - dreamcompiler 7y ago
      N95 masks protect healthcare workers because HC workers know how to properly fit them; the general public does not have this training and thus N95 masks are wasted on the GP. Another part of the confusion is that early on (six weeks ago) the assumption was that the virus spread like the flu, i.e. via droplets from coughing and sneezing. Masks alone (without face shields) are of little benefit for droplet-spread disease because they don't protect your eyes. Now we know the virus spreads via aerosols which are generated by talking or even breathing. Cloth masks do indeed help for aerosols by trapping virus particles electrostatically and by increasing humidity, both of which keep the virus out of your respiratory tract. Or so the latest thinking goes. Hanlon's Razor applies, but this virus is also an insidious bastard that behaves very differently from what public health experts had expected.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- eli 7y ago
  I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I’m certain that lying to the public about what they can do to stop the virus was a bad call and will have lasting harm.
  - ooobit2 7y ago
    Not just a bad call, the lack of ownership by Democrats and their half-working-on-the-issue, half-keeping-the-Trump-tabloid-train-moving throughout all of this contributed significantly to the overall failure, and has played a huge role in us reaching Great Depression-era economic status. Every overblown executive order, news report, today-people-are-dangerous, tomorrow-we're-readying-to-reopen. Lying was just phase one or two. We're up to phase six now.
  - loopz 7y ago
    We hear the same over the pond. The argument is that the masks may not be fit for purpose or be used incorrectly, thus might actually be more contagious as people will tend to touch their faces more often etc. The official stances are still that people need training in order to use masks correctly, and the masks must meet standards to protect the user. All masks may protect others to some degree though. "Masks work, don't work" are not cogent arguments. It's the same with plastic gloves. Their usage in ie. grocery stores etc. may not help as much as incorrect usage may work against the intention. Again the argument is that if you get your hands dirty, you know you need to wash your hands and might think twice before touching face. Even washing hands properly require some training. We've since learned that less extreme measures may be good enough once you have control, testing and tracking.
- ramraj07 7y ago
  The problem is no one likes to look stupid, and this is one of the cases where anyone who can spell words together was able to see through the BS. Whether they are going to hoard it or not, the solution is not for an expert to lie to the public.
lambdasquirrel 7y ago
No one knows why the CDC issued the guidelines that they did. There's also fairly little doubt that the CDC in previous decades would've been smarter and better organized. A lot of the commentary about the matter is disingenuous. Of course they won't filter out all the infectious agents for all healthcare workers forever. It was a matter of risk mitigation, just as much as shelter-in-place is. Getting infected is a numbers game, as is the live-locking of available hospital capacity.
tzs 7y ago
Surgeons wear masks to protect the patient from droplets from the surgeon's nose and mouth, which otherwise could easily fall right into the patient's open wound.
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  which is still relevant for slowing down the spread of a respiratory virus.
ardy42 7y ago
> Of course the “masks don’t work” was pure, transparent, bullshit from the very beginning. It didn’t even pass the smell test. No, that's not true. Maybe the advice was wrong, but it wasn't "pure, transparent, bullshit." It was always clearly stated that N95s worked if worn properly, but there was a lot of debate if surgical masks would offer much protection or not (they're known to be inadequate for certain viruses). Especially early on, people didn't understand much about this virus, such as the particle sizes involved or if asymptomatic transmission was real or not. There were a lot of factors to weigh in the recommendation in an environment of uncertainty. > Now if the argument was “please save masks for healthcare workers first, they’re higher risk” that would be fine. They did make that argument: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cdc-says-americans-dont-have-to-wear-facemasks-because-of-coronavirus-2020-01-30 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cdc-says-americans-don... > Most people don’t know how to use face masks correctly, and a rush to buy masks could prevent the people who need them most — health care providers — from getting them, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a scholar at the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. > In fact the U.S. surgeon general recently urged the public to “STOP BUYING MASKS!” “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!,” wrote Surgeon General Jerome Adams on Twitter US:TWTR > But “they don’t work”? Fuck off. It's also pretty clear that they were right that tons of people in the general public don't know how to wear masks correctly. I don't go out much, but when I do there's always a bunch of fools wearing N95s improperly (not using both straps, bunching both straps together behind the head, not shaping the noise area to fit the face). I even see people wearing surgical masks improperly (e.g. not covering the nose, not shaping the nose area, not folding out the material to stretch from the nose to under the chin, etc.). There's also the issue that the general public is unlikely to follow the kinds of rigorous protocols that make N95s effective in a healthcare setting.
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  There are two core problems with your argument: 1) Wearing masks is a trainable skill. None of us know how to use condoms initially either, yet literally millions of Americans use them effectively yearly. 2) Masks don’t have to be worn with perfect correctness to produce an effect in aggregate. If mask usage was even 30% effective, this would drop R0 by roughly as much, which is a big freaking deal. The N95 vs surgical mask is a tricky balance to strike; of course N95 should be saved for those at the highest risk, and if you know your mask will be sprayed with virus droplets, extra precautions must be taken. But that’s much more relevant to medical workers, not those of us who want to reduce risk going to the grocery store.
cycomanic 7y ago
Actually surgeons wear the masks to protect the patient not themselves. That's very similar to what likely is the biggest benefit of widespread mask use, reducing the infectiosness of people.
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  It’s amazing how many people blindly repeat this as if it’s a good argument. It’s not a good counter argument at all. Stopping other people from catching something you might have is a fantastic reason to ask everyone to wear a mask during a pandemic. It’s actually probably the main reason you’d want to do so, from a public health perspective, because it helps you prevent asymptomatic thread. The idea that the surgeon general would beg everyone to not wear a mask is utter madness.
  - cycomanic 7y ago
    I completely agree with you, they make perfect sense from a public health perspective and it was a major fck up by most of the health organisations World wide to say they wouldn't (if intentional or not doesn't really matter). However I was replying to a comment that was implying surgeons are using them to protect themselves. That is just wrong. There are enough good arguments for masks, one does not need to make incorrect statements.

skylanh 7y ago

I initially started following the WHO, CDC, and a few other health related agency Facebook pages when this pandemic actually started to take off in North America (mid-March). I had to stop following the WHO and CDC Facebook pages because the value of information they were posting was so poor, I was IMHO better of not having access to it.

felipemnoa 7y ago

So was it a straight out lie or incompetence? I remember reading here in HN that a lot of the masks do not actually protect you from the infection. But rather what a mask does is that it stops YOU from spreading the infection if you are infected.

Consultant32452 7y ago
I know it's hard to believe that the CDC et. al. would just blatantly lie to you. But consider that they were simultaneously saying that masks WOULD protect healthcare workers. Here's an example tweet where the surgeon general claims that masks do not protect regular people, but they do protect healthcare workers. This is obviously nonsensical, those two things can't both be true. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321... Additionally, the surgeon general has repeated this claim on live television as recently as a week ago. There is no way he's that incompetent.
- fulafel 7y ago
  Healthcare workers are in all-day contact with COVID patients that have late stage symptoms (fluid in lungs) and they perform operations where fluids spray around. Of course do not / do protect are simplifications as the effects are not binary. This is needed for communicating with the public, the meaning was "don't help much" vs "make a significant difference". If the health authorities always used the precise and caveat-ridden language of medical journal papers in order to ensure each sentence is logically correct when interpreted literally, they wouldn't get any messages through. The guidance about public usage of masks has changed in a lot of countries because the guidance changed from "no evidence that it protects the public from infection enough to make difference in epidemic spread" to "let's take even the small benefit of reducing spray from the potentially infected mask wearers". It's a sensible change when the mask shortages let up. No need to fan the flames of lightly assuming malice from health authorities, it's a bad time for that.
  - Consultant32452 7y ago

toohotatopic 7y ago

Isn't this still technically almost correct? The surgeon's masks don't entirely filter the virus out of the air. However, they work for a society because they prevent the virus from spreading into the air from those who are already infected.

Consultant32452 7y ago
The surgeon general disagrees with this claim. He claims that the masks do protect the healthcare workers. You can see the claim in this tweet, where he also claims that the masks don't protect you. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...
- DrScump 7y ago
  the masks do protect the healthcare workers Because properly equipped healthcare workers are also wearing eye protection. SARS-CoV-2 will quite happily enter at the eyes; in fact, eyes are a bigger attack surface than nostrils. With respect to protection from SARS coronaviruses, wearing just a mask and no eye protection is like a hockey goalie wearing a helmet but no mask.
  - MagnumOpus 7y ago
    > like a hockey goalie wearing a helmet but no mask. An apt comparison -- a damage reduction by 66% using only a fabric mask is massively worse than a damage reduction by 95% using proper PPE and procedures. In fact, it leaves you 7 times more likely to get infected (get hurt by a puck). But if anyone tried to sell the NHL-watching public the line that "helmets don't help", they would be rightfully humiliated in public.
    - loopz 7y ago
      For a helmet to help, it needs to be fit for purpose, otherwise they're dangerous as people assume they provide safety. When found, copy-cat masks are destroyed at border control, as they also don't provide the benefits to contain contagion.