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> 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks b

by zhdc1 5y ago

> 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them. The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly The US and other countries faced a mask shortage at the beginning of the pandemic. Masks don't provide absolute protection, but they do reduce viral load exposure (apologies if I got the terminology wrong here), which influences how bad the infection can become. So, what you want is for the available masks to go to the people most likely to be exposed to high viral loads, i.e. health care workers. The message the CDC and others attempted to get out was more or less 1. masks don't provide complete protection (which they don't), 2. they do reduce load exposure, so 3. please stop panic buying/hoarding masks until supply chain issues are worked out. What people actually heard was 1. masks don't work (at completely preventing an infection), which many of them simplified to "masks don't work". It also didn't help that the US Surgeon General at the time went on television before getting his talking points figured out.

winrid 5y ago
It was especially confusing when my company at the time (in sfbay area) hired someone to tell us that masks won't help because viruses are small and also we'll be back in the office soon. :)
- sampo 5y ago
  > to tell us that masks won't help because viruses are small It's actually 0.3 micrometer particles that are most difficult to filter. Smaller than that, particles start to dance around and not move smoothly, because of Brownian motion, so they get stuck in the filtering fibers better. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-filter-efficiency-as-a-function-of-particle-size-modified-from-Zevenhoven-and_fig8_266099381 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-filter-efficienc...
  - tzs 5y ago
    Here's a short explanation of how some of the mechanisms mention in that diagram work [1]. [1] https://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/documents/pdfs/042665.pdf https://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/documen...
josefx 5y ago
> The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly Probably as intended. Governments are not above outright lying about these matters when it suits them. Several years before covid the German government tried to push a flu vaccine (was it pig or bird flu?), politicians across the board vouched for its safety, some even got theirs on camera. It didn't take long for someone to leak the orders and distribution plans that clearly showed that politicians would not get the cheap, mass produced vaccine which was rushed out and stretched with various questionable additives to scale that everyone was worried about. Every single politician that made a show of getting vaccinated got a vaccine reserved for critical government positions as its production could not be scaled to cover the population. I think in response politicians started to blame the press for sabotaging the vaccination effort, when they could have avoided the whole issue by just taking the normal vaccine like everyone else, not a single one of these assholes was in any way "critical" to the day to day operation of the nation but they had to conspire to give the impression that the normal vaccine wasn't good enough for them.
native_samples 5y ago
> The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly No, there was no nuance here and everyone in this thread is mis-remembering or mis-understood what actually happened. Masks don't work against COVID. They never did. They don't reduce viral load or anything else either. In fact there was no evidence of masks doing much of anything in the scientific literature pre-COVID (post-COVID it's been polluted by terrible and invalid post-facto rationalization studies). Fauci/CDC/the entire public health community knew this and were saying so explicitly in private emails to each other, as well as in public. This wasn't just a US thing, every country was doing the same thing. UK public health officials were also saying masks didn't work for example. This was not because they were worried about a shortage, as their private emails made clear. It was because there was genuinely no evidence they could point at to support masking everyone. The moment they realized nobody in power cared about evidence anymore and they could do whatever they wanted, suddenly the masks came in. How to explain their previous stance? Oh, it was a noble lie for the greater good. Problem is, it wasn't - the idea of the noble lie is itself the lie. Very confusing, admittedly. But also, it should really be obvious that it's a lie: 1. It's very easy for governments to control imports and distributions of masks (they were virtually all imported from Asia back then). If you actually believe health care workers should be prioritized, lying to people for months in the hope they believe you and then reversing your position is the absolute worst way to do things. Imposing customs controls at the ports is the best way. 2. Anyone who paid attention to case graphs can immediately see that they don't change even a tiny bit when mask mandates are added or removed. See [1] for a few examples but there are hundreds more. [1] https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-are?s=r https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...
- chimprich 5y ago
  That blog post is complete nonsense. You can't look at graphs of when mask mandates were introduced and then lifted, because you can't isolate cause and effect. Mask mandates tend to get introduced when cases are going up, and removed when cases are going down. This would be absolutely shredded in a scientific paper, which is why it's a blog post rather than part of the literature.
  - 5y ago
magicalhippo 5y ago
> 1. masks don't work (at completely preventing an infection), which many of them simplified to "masks don't work". I'm from Norway. Here a quote from one of the largest news outlets[1] mid February 2020 (my translation): Face masks have little effect on preventing infection among the population and can in some cases contribute to increasing the risk of infection, says Hanne-Merete Eriksen-Volle, section leader at the National Institute of Public Health. So not only did they say masks don't work they went one further and said masks can be bad. They harped the same message for several months until they did a 180 and said everyone should wear masks. To me, this was a huge failure in communication which highlighted a severe lack of ability to communicate with the public in our health sector. [1]: https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/fhi_-munnbind-gir-falsk-trygghet-1.14902854 https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/fhi_-munnbind-gir-falsk-trygghet...

by zhdc1 5y ago

winrid 5y ago

It was especially confusing when my company at the time (in sfbay area) hired someone to tell us that masks won't help because viruses are small and also we'll be back in the office soon. :)

sampo 5y ago
> to tell us that masks won't help because viruses are small It's actually 0.3 micrometer particles that are most difficult to filter. Smaller than that, particles start to dance around and not move smoothly, because of Brownian motion, so they get stuck in the filtering fibers better. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-filter-efficiency-as-a-function-of-particle-size-modified-from-Zevenhoven-and_fig8_266099381 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-filter-efficienc...
- tzs 5y ago
  Here's a short explanation of how some of the mechanisms mention in that diagram work [1]. [1] https://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/documents/pdfs/042665.pdf https://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/documen...

josefx 5y ago

> The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly Probably as intended. Governments are not above outright lying about these matters when it suits them. Several years before covid the German government tried to push a flu vaccine (was it pig or bird flu?), politicians across the board vouched for its safety, some even got theirs on camera. It didn't take long for someone to leak the orders and distribution plans that clearly showed that politicians would not get the cheap, mass produced vaccine which was rushed out and stretched with various questionable additives to scale that everyone was worried about. Every single politician that made a show of getting vaccinated got a vaccine reserved for critical government positions as its production could not be scaled to cover the population. I think in response politicians started to blame the press for sabotaging the vaccination effort, when they could have avoided the whole issue by just taking the normal vaccine like everyone else, not a single one of these assholes was in any way "critical" to the day to day operation of the nation but they had to conspire to give the impression that the normal vaccine wasn't good enough for them.

native_samples 5y ago

> The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly No, there was no nuance here and everyone in this thread is mis-remembering or mis-understood what actually happened. Masks don't work against COVID. They never did. They don't reduce viral load or anything else either. In fact there was no evidence of masks doing much of anything in the scientific literature pre-COVID (post-COVID it's been polluted by terrible and invalid post-facto rationalization studies). Fauci/CDC/the entire public health community knew this and were saying so explicitly in private emails to each other, as well as in public. This wasn't just a US thing, every country was doing the same thing. UK public health officials were also saying masks didn't work for example. This was not because they were worried about a shortage, as their private emails made clear. It was because there was genuinely no evidence they could point at to support masking everyone. The moment they realized nobody in power cared about evidence anymore and they could do whatever they wanted, suddenly the masks came in. How to explain their previous stance? Oh, it was a noble lie for the greater good. Problem is, it wasn't - the idea of the noble lie is itself the lie. Very confusing, admittedly. But also, it should really be obvious that it's a lie: 1. It's very easy for governments to control imports and distributions of masks (they were virtually all imported from Asia back then). If you actually believe health care workers should be prioritized, lying to people for months in the hope they believe you and then reversing your position is the absolute worst way to do things. Imposing customs controls at the ports is the best way. 2. Anyone who paid attention to case graphs can immediately see that they don't change even a tiny bit when mask mandates are added or removed. See [1] for a few examples but there are hundreds more. [1] https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-are?s=r https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...

chimprich 5y ago
That blog post is complete nonsense. You can't look at graphs of when mask mandates were introduced and then lifted, because you can't isolate cause and effect. Mask mandates tend to get introduced when cases are going up, and removed when cases are going down. This would be absolutely shredded in a scientific paper, which is why it's a blog post rather than part of the literature.
- 5y ago

magicalhippo 5y ago

> 1. masks don't work (at completely preventing an infection), which many of them simplified to "masks don't work". I'm from Norway. Here a quote from one of the largest news outlets[1] mid February 2020 (my translation): Face masks have little effect on preventing infection among the population and can in some cases contribute to increasing the risk of infection, says Hanne-Merete Eriksen-Volle, section leader at the National Institute of Public Health. So not only did they say masks don't work they went one further and said masks can be bad. They harped the same message for several months until they did a 180 and said everyone should wear masks. To me, this was a huge failure in communication which highlighted a severe lack of ability to communicate with the public in our health sector. [1]: https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/fhi_-munnbind-gir-falsk-trygghet-1.14902854 https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/fhi_-munnbind-gir-falsk-trygghet...