Other countries told everyone to wear pieces of cloth around their face in the early days of the pandemic hitting their country. There was no cloth shortage, an

Other countries told everyone to wear pieces of cloth around their face in the early days of the pandemic hitting their country. There was no cloth shortage, and this was a basic precaution that could (and should) have been taken without badly affecting the supply of respirators for medical personnel. This is to say nothing of the lies[1] told in service of this policy: principally that masks aren't effective for controlling spread among the general public when there was no contrary evidence and the prudent prior would've been to use masks (for a fucking respiratory disease!) until proven ineffective. Policymaking and public health guidance is complex. There are details of the population's behavior that can't be fully controlled, but can be influenced, and maintaining credibility is crucially important here. Burning public trust with lies (or worse, basic inability to think critically under conditions of uncertainty) early on in the pandemic was a lot more damaging than the incidental effect of a cloth-mask recommendation on early N95 supply would have been. [1] Worse than and more plausible than lies is simply incompetence. The medical industry is famously bad at critical thinking: I've known people who came out of (top-ranked) med school _less_ able to reason under uncertainty and deal with statistics, because of the culture of oversimplification they're indoctrinated with. I have no opinion on whether this is wise for the field overall, but it's an especially poor fit for a fast-moving, low-information environment like the early days of a pandemic.