5 ms·

If by people you mean academic and institutional voices in power, then I fully agree. I'm only repeating my comment above for effect, here: the WHO and CDC sai

If by people you mean academic and institutional voices in power, then I fully agree. I'm only repeating my comment above for effect, here: the WHO and CDC said that masks were not recommended for the general public, and did more harm than good, and this only changed in June. So from here, the issue is that common sense was shot down in favor of credentialism. I wore a mask starting in March because it was common sense, and I was given scientific arguments for not wearing them. Because, science. That I observed medical professionals wearing them, and east Asian citizens doing this for decades already, was irrelevant in the face of credentialed spokespeople from large organizations arguing that up was down and down was up. So then the idea that people are children and should be treated as such becomes very elitist if taken like this.

renewiltord 6y ago
You and me both, brother. Everyone I knew in my friend groups had their masks up. N95s and P100s we all had for California wildfire season. It was the perfect use of knowledge over argument from authority: we were all masked up and we knew we were right. Other things people said: * N95s have a short shelf-life. Complete bullshit. The real first POF is the elasticated band. If that's fine, your fit will probably be fine. We knew this wasn't true so my 10 year old masks were still legit. * N95s require a lot of training for fit. The fit test is trivial to do. We knew this but lots of people on HN and authorities claimed this wasn't the case. * N95s cannot be reused. This was highly likely to be nonsense. The virus doesn't survive on surfaces for very long and that was the high probability event. After all, viruses rarely mutate so that they're terrible in all ways. i.e. this virus likely behaves like other coronaviruses except for a few variations. And of course those with our half-mask respirators printed our exhale valves and placed our P100s in them and were full protected. There was a lot of misinformation going around by people who just didn't know very much and were very eager to sound authoritative. They were all about "sources" and "citations" that are just parrot views (i.e. single primary source, many secondary sources giving the impression of consensus). People made fun of the tech industry for how they handled it, too. Techies (being coddled millennial snowflakes) shut down before any government, stopped business flights to/from China, and started working from home and wearing masks earlier. Honestly, my biggest mistake was that I was one of the few in my group of friends who believed the US had competent bureaucrats and so I stayed in the market while my friends sold ahead of the crash. Welp.
- pas 6y ago
  N95 masks lose some efficacy in a few hours as they get exposed to humidity. But they can be "recharged". https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/devices/one-day-medical-workers-might-plug-in-their-smart-masks https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/devices/on...
  - denimnerd42 6y ago
    N95 without a charge is still going to be better than any other mask typically used. I have an N95 I've worn for the week. I can fill it up with water in the sink and it won't drip any water out. What the hell is going on there..
    - pas 6y ago
      Yeah, no questions about that. Just by having it properly fit you are probably beating 99% of mask wearers unfortunately. Though even that is magnitudes better than nothing.
Gibbon1 6y ago
What was pretty obvious was there were two biases in play with masks. A science bias. And a credentialist bias. Science bias leads you to come down hard that things that aren't proven are false. No hard proof double blind studies that masks work with covid19 means mask don't work. Credentialist bias makes you assume people without are stupid and need to be tricked to do the right thing.
easde 6y ago
Not just masks. Early projections (March / April) by supposedly reputable groups like IHME were wildly inaccurate. Even a cursory reading of their methods showed that they had no idea what they were doing. Oversimplifying a bit, they were fitting the CDF of a Gaussian to the cumulative deaths over time. Not a reasonable way of modeling exponential growth. Nevertheless, IHME was kept in the spotlight by the government and media because they deemed the experts as an independent health research center at a reputable university. Their predictions drove many poor policy decisions, culminating in the infamous claim by Trump that the pandemic would be over soon after Easter. Many epidemiologists, statisticians, physicists, mathematicians etc. called their conclusions into question and built better models (mostly using SEIR / SEIS). It took several more months for IHME to improve their own model, but by then the damage was already done.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  Shit, I wasn't even aware of that one. It is so spectacularly stupid I almost think it is a more logical explanation that it is an inside job, surely nobody can be that stupid, right? I mean I am just a computer programmer but I know what exponential growth is and what it looks like.
Rapzid 6y ago
CDC recommended masks be worn in public in Aril 2nd, just a couple weeks after the first US shutdowns. There were "only" about 8k total confirmed deaths in the US at that time. That was ~300k deaths ago. They had it wrong for a few weeks, okay. But they changed their guidelines, and there was new data showing the efficacy of wearing masks(at least the combination of the masks and the social behavior they encourage), and they have stuck to those guidelines for nearly 8 months now. I'm honestly amazed how long people are being hung up on that single, one-way change in guidelines during the early weeks. It's unfortunate the guidelines didn't come sooner. But looking at the timeline, where we were then, and where we are now.. The totality of it all.. IDK, it's weird seeing people constantly bringing it up and blaming public health official. Especially considering what the messaging from non-health public officials has been over the past 8 months and 300k deaths.
- mancerayder 6y ago
  Well part of the topic in this long post and threads is trust in health authorities. I think it's rational and not unreasonable to criticize decisions that permanently damaged the trust. Stuff was confusing as it was in April. I argued with people about masks then. Normal, rational people, who didn't see this update and sudden change of tune. The information noise level was high in those days, which didn't help.
  - pas 6y ago
    Absolutely. The communication was worse than awful, and on top of that it wasn't even coordinated. Plus to make matters even worse instead of doing that all that the current US administration did was to issue gag orders to scientists. Instead of organizing PPE distribution and informing people that it might come to mandatory mask wearing, the message was a very dumb "well, maybe, but really think of the shortage and well, it's a hard question". :/

renewiltord 6y ago

You and me both, brother. Everyone I knew in my friend groups had their masks up. N95s and P100s we all had for California wildfire season. It was the perfect use of knowledge over argument from authority: we were all masked up and we knew we were right. Other things people said: * N95s have a short shelf-life. Complete bullshit. The real first POF is the elasticated band. If that's fine, your fit will probably be fine. We knew this wasn't true so my 10 year old masks were still legit. * N95s require a lot of training for fit. The fit test is trivial to do. We knew this but lots of people on HN and authorities claimed this wasn't the case. * N95s cannot be reused. This was highly likely to be nonsense. The virus doesn't survive on surfaces for very long and that was the high probability event. After all, viruses rarely mutate so that they're terrible in all ways. i.e. this virus likely behaves like other coronaviruses except for a few variations. And of course those with our half-mask respirators printed our exhale valves and placed our P100s in them and were full protected. There was a lot of misinformation going around by people who just didn't know very much and were very eager to sound authoritative. They were all about "sources" and "citations" that are just parrot views (i.e. single primary source, many secondary sources giving the impression of consensus). People made fun of the tech industry for how they handled it, too. Techies (being coddled millennial snowflakes) shut down before any government, stopped business flights to/from China, and started working from home and wearing masks earlier. Honestly, my biggest mistake was that I was one of the few in my group of friends who believed the US had competent bureaucrats and so I stayed in the market while my friends sold ahead of the crash. Welp.

pas 6y ago
N95 masks lose some efficacy in a few hours as they get exposed to humidity. But they can be "recharged". https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/devices/one-day-medical-workers-might-plug-in-their-smart-masks https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/devices/on...
- denimnerd42 6y ago
  N95 without a charge is still going to be better than any other mask typically used. I have an N95 I've worn for the week. I can fill it up with water in the sink and it won't drip any water out. What the hell is going on there..
  - pas 6y ago
    Yeah, no questions about that. Just by having it properly fit you are probably beating 99% of mask wearers unfortunately. Though even that is magnitudes better than nothing.

Gibbon1 6y ago

What was pretty obvious was there were two biases in play with masks. A science bias. And a credentialist bias. Science bias leads you to come down hard that things that aren't proven are false. No hard proof double blind studies that masks work with covid19 means mask don't work. Credentialist bias makes you assume people without are stupid and need to be tricked to do the right thing.

easde 6y ago

Not just masks. Early projections (March / April) by supposedly reputable groups like IHME were wildly inaccurate. Even a cursory reading of their methods showed that they had no idea what they were doing. Oversimplifying a bit, they were fitting the CDF of a Gaussian to the cumulative deaths over time. Not a reasonable way of modeling exponential growth. Nevertheless, IHME was kept in the spotlight by the government and media because they deemed the experts as an independent health research center at a reputable university. Their predictions drove many poor policy decisions, culminating in the infamous claim by Trump that the pandemic would be over soon after Easter. Many epidemiologists, statisticians, physicists, mathematicians etc. called their conclusions into question and built better models (mostly using SEIR / SEIS). It took several more months for IHME to improve their own model, but by then the damage was already done.

tomjen3 6y ago
Shit, I wasn't even aware of that one. It is so spectacularly stupid I almost think it is a more logical explanation that it is an inside job, surely nobody can be that stupid, right? I mean I am just a computer programmer but I know what exponential growth is and what it looks like.

Rapzid 6y ago

CDC recommended masks be worn in public in Aril 2nd, just a couple weeks after the first US shutdowns. There were "only" about 8k total confirmed deaths in the US at that time. That was ~300k deaths ago. They had it wrong for a few weeks, okay. But they changed their guidelines, and there was new data showing the efficacy of wearing masks(at least the combination of the masks and the social behavior they encourage), and they have stuck to those guidelines for nearly 8 months now. I'm honestly amazed how long people are being hung up on that single, one-way change in guidelines during the early weeks. It's unfortunate the guidelines didn't come sooner. But looking at the timeline, where we were then, and where we are now.. The totality of it all.. IDK, it's weird seeing people constantly bringing it up and blaming public health official. Especially considering what the messaging from non-health public officials has been over the past 8 months and 300k deaths.

mancerayder 6y ago
Well part of the topic in this long post and threads is trust in health authorities. I think it's rational and not unreasonable to criticize decisions that permanently damaged the trust. Stuff was confusing as it was in April. I argued with people about masks then. Normal, rational people, who didn't see this update and sudden change of tune. The information noise level was high in those days, which didn't help.
- pas 6y ago
  Absolutely. The communication was worse than awful, and on top of that it wasn't even coordinated. Plus to make matters even worse instead of doing that all that the current US administration did was to issue gag orders to scientists. Instead of organizing PPE distribution and informing people that it might come to mandatory mask wearing, the message was a very dumb "well, maybe, but really think of the shortage and well, it's a hard question". :/