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> Thing is, there wasn't that much of it before the CDC spent over a month spewing bullshit telling people not to wear masks because masks don't stop the spread

> Thing is, there wasn't that much of it before the CDC spent over a month spewing bullshit telling people not to wear masks because masks don't stop the spread of COVID. They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times of crisis. You can agree or disagree but this was neither malicious nor in my opinion outside the scope of the role. We also knew a lot less about what was going on at that time, and once again, that means we need to extend some degree of leniency to folks making conservative if difficult choices like this. If it came down to it yeah of course we need to secure the supply for first responders first. Now we never should have been in that position in the first place but that was the fault of past administrations, not the CDC in the moment and didn't change what needed to be done. > It was obvious to everyone and their dog that masks help stop the spread of respiratory infections. Some masks, but not all masks. Single layer cloth masks do nothing. [1] N95s sure, but even at peak COVID most people weren't wearing N95s, they were wearing non-medical surgical-style masks, which only block between 30 and 70% of particles. Even still while less effective than N95s, those surgical masks do help. [2] [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/8460528/masks-effectiveness-omicron/ https://globalnews.ca/news/8460528/masks-effectiveness-omicr... [2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg6296 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg6296

jacquesm 4y ago
An important consideration that I have not seen mentioned yet is that masks have a 'best before date', this is because they are infused with a static charge that aims to attract particles to the mask material and this charge doesn't last forever. You can 'recharge' masks but that's a lot of work and usually not in the normal path for such supplies. So stockpiles that were present were not going to be effective against viruses (which are very small particles). Add to that that this was before there was positive confirmation the virus was airborne (though there were plenty of people suggesting that none had proof) to make the chaos complete. I don't think that even with hindsight there was a set of decisions that would not have left something to be disputed.
- ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  Other countries got it right. When the CDC was dithering about whether masks work and whether the virus was airborne (which should have been clear by early February with all the case evidence we had from Asia), their South Korean counterparts ordered Samsung to purchase tons of meltblown fibers, because making the masks themselves is not hard. Then the Korean government instituted limits on exports and rationing of what was on the market. I worked in a hospital in Seoul, and we (non-caregivers) got two N95s per week. This is what the US government should have done: used the defense production act to provide a guaranteed purchaser with 2 or 3-year contracts for whoever could manufacture masks or mask components domestically ASAP, instead of ruining their credibility to calm panic, and then coordinated the states in temporarily controlling rationing until supplies stabilized. The idiocy that is a national stockpile is another thing. If the stockpile is of persihables what you really need is a nationally mandated buffer, with the govt paying suppliers to rotate through X days of stock on hand.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    I wonder how much of the damage to South Korea was due to that one group of people that went around infecting others on purpose, if not for that they may well have done much better still.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    > and whether the virus was airborne The WHO guidelines are to assume an atypical pneumonia is airborne until it’s proven not to be. The WHO didn’t follow its guidelines and instead parroted the CCP propaganda. (We knew it was airborne in December 2019)
    - ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
      Interesting. That's also the route our hospital took for Monkeypox: negative pressure isolation wards until proven not airborne. I'm quite satisfied that Korean public health authorities understand the precautionary principle.
- deleted 4y ago
stormking 4y ago
> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. That's still lying. They gave you, the individual, false information, and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it. Do you really not see how destructive this was? Do you really expect people to not only forgive but most importantly forget this lie, just because they "made it clear after the fact"? How were you supposed to know they're not lying, again, about the vaccines and their safety? I'm no American but it was the exactly the same here in Germany, with exactly the same consequences. It really baffles me when now government officials whine about people not trusting them, anymore.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > That's still lying. They gave you, the individual, false information, ... Yes it was lying. Yes it was false information. No, that's not outside the scope of their role at times. > ... and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it. No, it was for the individual good. Hoarding of masks by randos in the middle of nowhere leading to no supply for the first responders in hospital puts you, the individual, at greater risk. If all the hospital staff have COVID and no ability to stop transmission within hospital because Bob the Prepper has filled his underground HEPA filtered bunker with masks, yes, that puts you at risk. You can weigh the trade-offs but your statement that there was no other way of viewing the situation is simply wrong. > Do you really not see how destructive this was? Do you really expect people to not only forgive but most importantly forget this lie, just because they "made it clear after the fact"? How were you supposed to know they're not lying, again, about the vaccines and their safety? Again, a crap situation, but one that the CDC wasn't responsible for. It was their job to mitigate to the best of their abilities. Tough times call for tough decisions. We know how groups react, we knew what people would have done. I'm pissed the stockpiles were allowed to run low, and I'm happy the first-responders were prioritized as I believe this gave everyone the best chance. > It really baffles me when now government officials whine about people not trusting them, anymore. It doesn't surprise me, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong choice at the time given what we knew. [edit] They had an optimization problem: basically nobody in the population had COVID at the time, but those who did were likely to end up in hospital. Spreading out the limited masks over a population where almost nobody had it put far more people at risk than concentrating the supply in hospitals where far more people had it. This isn't rocket science. People were hoarding pasta at the time, and you think people were going to make good decisions about masks? The first casualty of War is Truth as they say.
cscurmudgeon 4y ago
Misinformation and lying with good intentions is still misinfo and lying.
slg 4y ago
>The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times of crisis. You can agree or disagree but this was neither malicious nor in my opinion outside the scope of the role. I understand how dangerous it is for the government to lie, but what do people think would have been the proper approach here? Do we not remember what it was like during the early pandemic and all the hoarding that was going on? Did we forget how hospitals and retirement homes were using garbage bags and scuba equipment as PPE? Sometimes all the choices are bad. The choice to put the safety of medical professionals fighting the pandemic head on above the safety of the general citizenry seems like the least bad option. Because if the medical system collapsed, which seemed like a real possibility at the time, that would put the general citizenry in even more danger.
- int_19h 4y ago
  The proper approach would have been to pass emergency legislation establishing mask rationing and distribution. If need be, confiscate the entire existing supply and direct it to the hospitals. But don't lie about it.
  - slg 4y ago
    Is confiscating privately owned safety equipment the more democratic and libertarian approach than trying to convince people they shouldn't buy that equipment in the first place? That seems way more dystopian to me.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      "Trying to convince people" implies a good faith approach - i.e. being open about what you want and why. Lying to people that masks are no good is not "convincing" them to not buy masks - it's misleading them to do so. And yes, I think that between lying to literally everybody, and confiscating the property of some companies, the latter is much preferable from a democratic perspective. Indeed, it's just eminent domain, for which there's explicit provisions in constitution and/or laws of most (all?) democratic countries. And since it's done openly, if citizens are unhappy about it, they can always punish the politicians who did so in the next elections; but you can't do that to unelected bureaucrats and private actors, and especially not if they conceal what they're doing.
ilyt 4y ago
> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times of crisis. You can agree or disagree but this was neither malicious nor in my opinion outside the scope of the role. I feel like just outright telling people "hey, we don't have enough, please give it to most vulnerable people first" would be better approach than "lie and hope idiots believe it", thus producing whole swathes of idiots repeating the lie
- chefkoch 4y ago
  Sure, that would have worked. People were fighting each other over toilet paper.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people So make your own mask. Lots of people did, and there were loads of instructables. Sure, an N95 is better than a surgical mask, which is better than a homemade mask, which is better than a scarf or bank-robber bandana. I wore a mask to protect others, not myself. I'm not confident that a mask protects me from the effusions of others; but I'm pretty confident that wearing a mask reduces my own effusions.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    If you can blow visible smoke through the mask, then it’s ineffective against SARS2. In either direction. If you remove an N95 in a smokey environment, you’ll immediately smell the smoke, while you didn’t before you removed it. Exception: if someone is close enough to hit you with droplets when they speak (a foot or so), then a procedure mask is better than nothing.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      well, I'm a heavy smoker; I'm not troubled by other people's smoke, and I usually don't wear a mask while smoking :-) The last time I "gave up" smoking, I said to the doctor that I was expecting to get less winter colds. She said I was completely wrong, and that I should expect to get everything that was going around; that tobacco smokers maintain a lung environment that is hostile to anything living, including microbes, and that quitters can expect to catch everything that's going. I have no idea whether that was true. But I'm still standing - yeah, yeah, yeah.
joenot443 4y ago
> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. I wouldn't ever be able to trust a govt org again if it was revealed they'd made the decision to deliberately lie to their populace. There are few things that a government can do which is unforgivable, and brazenly lying to the faces of its citizens is one of them.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  > There are few things that a government can do which is unforgivable, and brazenly lying to the faces of its citizens is one of them. That's a pretty naive position and by its definition one shouldn't trust any government on earth. Government exists to provide glue for societies when individual motivation is insufficient or harmful. These situations are generally pretty serious (national health crisis, economic failures, intelligence, war) and thus require triage. "The first casualty when war comes is truth" isn't actually pointing to an absolute devaluing of truth: it's noting that suddenly there are many other goals that people perceive as more important than truth. E.g. preservation of national sovereignty, prevention of casualties, maintaining civil morale, etc.
  - rajin444 4y ago
    > The first casualty when war comes is truth Most wars would not be fought if governments were trustworthy. And those that remain could be fought with full transparency. Trust is everything in society. When you start making exceptions everything falls apart.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Trust does create a post-scarcity society, and any government who fought a war with full transparency would lose (osint).
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times of crisis Tough decisions? Yes, lies - with a straight face? No. Now what? How can you do public health without public trust?* How can you govern effectively when the record showed you lied? The irony? I still see people wearing masks; the kind of mask that are proven to be ineffective. * On top of it we were assured these people were "the experts." However, this wasn't our first respiratory pandemic. Yet we were completely unprepared? What is their area of expertise? Lies? Publib health and government based on lies isn't sustainable. Yet anyone who questioned that was marginalized? It get worse and worse.
jefftk 4y ago
> there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders But they didn't do that either. They could have requisitioned the masks from private retailers, or just gone and bought them, but instead retailers continued selling them and the Surgeon General just tweeted at individuals telling them to stop buying them.
cokeandpepsi 4y ago
> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people Partly.. There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday. “There also is the issue that we have a massive global shortage,” Ryan said about masks and other medical supplies https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-recommendation-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-r...
darkerside 4y ago
> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. I hear this a lot. Do you have a citation? My impression is that nobody knew what was going on, underprepared officials jumped the gun with premature statements, and after the fact some people tried to rationalize the incompetence.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  The contemporaneous statements often mentioned shortages and preserving masks for healthcare workers. This Fauci interview in early March has him saying that he thinks masks aren't necessary at the time but also saying that he isn't against people wearing them (both things together at ~1 minute if you are impatient): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI This CDC transcript doesn't talk a lot about PPE, but it talks about directing it to healthcare workers that are at higher risk: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0303-COVID-19-update.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0303-COVID-19-updat... I'm sure there's stuff that looks worse if you go back through the 6 weeks previous to that, but early March is when things started to really happen in the US (I remember making a relatively large shopping trip that felt like it put me on the cautious side of things, and then the next week I started working from home). There's a lot of people saying that the government was saying not to wear masks, which is subtly different from saying that people don't need to wear masks, or that masks won't benefit most people. The surgeon general was out there saying they weren't effective for the general public, which is bad but still different from saying not to wear them. And I'm not sure it's entirely fair to attribute his comms failures to the CDC (they might have had a hand in it, who knows, but they don't control the surgeon general). Given how well people do with their masks (I still regularly see people wearing low quality masks incorrectly!), it seems true enough that they should be secondary to things like social distancing. I was sort of pleased and surprised a few weeks ago when my hospital was handing out N95s. Of course, it didn't matter much when half the patients had them under their nose (one confused lady had it sideways with the straps around her ears). They started self screening the next week, with only procedure masks available.
  - 4y ago
AlchemistCamp 4y ago
> Single layer cloth masks do nothing. Really? If an infected person standing in front of you in a crowded room sneezes, you believe the risks would be unaffected by whether or not they were wearing a cloth mask? Whether their sneeze were blocked or droplets of spittle and mucus went spewing throughout the room, your exposure and that of people standing in distant parts of the room would be identical? In general I hate the “citation needed” forum response, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Into a single layer cloth mask correct it does nothing.
bee_rider 4y ago
From your article: > A better option, he says? Start with a two-layered cloth mask that has been washed, which gives it the capacity to filter better. If you want to go one step further in protection, use a KN95 mask, he says. So it isn’t like the suggested option is some esoteric thing that you need a 3M factory to make. “Single layers cloth masks don’t work” isn’t technically a lie but it omits that there was an alternative solution that was within the means of like… anybody with a sewing machine and a washing machine to make.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  There’s a reason I linked the study. I agree they work.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    I can see the idea of guiding the public to not wear masks if it really is some zero-sum game where first responders lose if the public wears them. I disagree with this strategy due to the second order effects (reduced trust, later confusion), but it at least makes some sort of sense. I can’t see the logic of telling the public that masks don’t help, if it is possible for people to actually increase the supply of masks by making them at home. In this case it isn’t a small manipulation that doesn’t hurt anyone, but harmful misinformation.

jacquesm 4y ago

An important consideration that I have not seen mentioned yet is that masks have a 'best before date', this is because they are infused with a static charge that aims to attract particles to the mask material and this charge doesn't last forever. You can 'recharge' masks but that's a lot of work and usually not in the normal path for such supplies. So stockpiles that were present were not going to be effective against viruses (which are very small particles). Add to that that this was before there was positive confirmation the virus was airborne (though there were plenty of people suggesting that none had proof) to make the chaos complete. I don't think that even with hindsight there was a set of decisions that would not have left something to be disputed.

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
Other countries got it right. When the CDC was dithering about whether masks work and whether the virus was airborne (which should have been clear by early February with all the case evidence we had from Asia), their South Korean counterparts ordered Samsung to purchase tons of meltblown fibers, because making the masks themselves is not hard. Then the Korean government instituted limits on exports and rationing of what was on the market. I worked in a hospital in Seoul, and we (non-caregivers) got two N95s per week. This is what the US government should have done: used the defense production act to provide a guaranteed purchaser with 2 or 3-year contracts for whoever could manufacture masks or mask components domestically ASAP, instead of ruining their credibility to calm panic, and then coordinated the states in temporarily controlling rationing until supplies stabilized. The idiocy that is a national stockpile is another thing. If the stockpile is of persihables what you really need is a nationally mandated buffer, with the govt paying suppliers to rotate through X days of stock on hand.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I wonder how much of the damage to South Korea was due to that one group of people that went around infecting others on purpose, if not for that they may well have done much better still.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  > and whether the virus was airborne The WHO guidelines are to assume an atypical pneumonia is airborne until it’s proven not to be. The WHO didn’t follow its guidelines and instead parroted the CCP propaganda. (We knew it was airborne in December 2019)
  - ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
    Interesting. That's also the route our hospital took for Monkeypox: negative pressure isolation wards until proven not airborne. I'm quite satisfied that Korean public health authorities understand the precautionary principle.
deleted 4y ago

stormking 4y ago

> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. That's still lying. They gave you, the individual, false information, and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it. Do you really not see how destructive this was? Do you really expect people to not only forgive but most importantly forget this lie, just because they "made it clear after the fact"? How were you supposed to know they're not lying, again, about the vaccines and their safety? I'm no American but it was the exactly the same here in Germany, with exactly the same consequences. It really baffles me when now government officials whine about people not trusting them, anymore.

arcticbull 4y ago
> That's still lying. They gave you, the individual, false information, ... Yes it was lying. Yes it was false information. No, that's not outside the scope of their role at times. > ... and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it. No, it was for the individual good. Hoarding of masks by randos in the middle of nowhere leading to no supply for the first responders in hospital puts you, the individual, at greater risk. If all the hospital staff have COVID and no ability to stop transmission within hospital because Bob the Prepper has filled his underground HEPA filtered bunker with masks, yes, that puts you at risk. You can weigh the trade-offs but your statement that there was no other way of viewing the situation is simply wrong. > Do you really not see how destructive this was? Do you really expect people to not only forgive but most importantly forget this lie, just because they "made it clear after the fact"? How were you supposed to know they're not lying, again, about the vaccines and their safety? Again, a crap situation, but one that the CDC wasn't responsible for. It was their job to mitigate to the best of their abilities. Tough times call for tough decisions. We know how groups react, we knew what people would have done. I'm pissed the stockpiles were allowed to run low, and I'm happy the first-responders were prioritized as I believe this gave everyone the best chance. > It really baffles me when now government officials whine about people not trusting them, anymore. It doesn't surprise me, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong choice at the time given what we knew. [edit] They had an optimization problem: basically nobody in the population had COVID at the time, but those who did were likely to end up in hospital. Spreading out the limited masks over a population where almost nobody had it put far more people at risk than concentrating the supply in hospitals where far more people had it. This isn't rocket science. People were hoarding pasta at the time, and you think people were going to make good decisions about masks? The first casualty of War is Truth as they say.

cscurmudgeon 4y ago

Misinformation and lying with good intentions is still misinfo and lying.

slg 4y ago

>The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times of crisis. You can agree or disagree but this was neither malicious nor in my opinion outside the scope of the role. I understand how dangerous it is for the government to lie, but what do people think would have been the proper approach here? Do we not remember what it was like during the early pandemic and all the hoarding that was going on? Did we forget how hospitals and retirement homes were using garbage bags and scuba equipment as PPE? Sometimes all the choices are bad. The choice to put the safety of medical professionals fighting the pandemic head on above the safety of the general citizenry seems like the least bad option. Because if the medical system collapsed, which seemed like a real possibility at the time, that would put the general citizenry in even more danger.

int_19h 4y ago
The proper approach would have been to pass emergency legislation establishing mask rationing and distribution. If need be, confiscate the entire existing supply and direct it to the hospitals. But don't lie about it.
- slg 4y ago
  Is confiscating privately owned safety equipment the more democratic and libertarian approach than trying to convince people they shouldn't buy that equipment in the first place? That seems way more dystopian to me.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    "Trying to convince people" implies a good faith approach - i.e. being open about what you want and why. Lying to people that masks are no good is not "convincing" them to not buy masks - it's misleading them to do so. And yes, I think that between lying to literally everybody, and confiscating the property of some companies, the latter is much preferable from a democratic perspective. Indeed, it's just eminent domain, for which there's explicit provisions in constitution and/or laws of most (all?) democratic countries. And since it's done openly, if citizens are unhappy about it, they can always punish the politicians who did so in the next elections; but you can't do that to unelected bureaucrats and private actors, and especially not if they conceal what they're doing.

ilyt 4y ago

chefkoch 4y ago
Sure, that would have worked. People were fighting each other over toilet paper.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people So make your own mask. Lots of people did, and there were loads of instructables. Sure, an N95 is better than a surgical mask, which is better than a homemade mask, which is better than a scarf or bank-robber bandana. I wore a mask to protect others, not myself. I'm not confident that a mask protects me from the effusions of others; but I'm pretty confident that wearing a mask reduces my own effusions.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  If you can blow visible smoke through the mask, then it’s ineffective against SARS2. In either direction. If you remove an N95 in a smokey environment, you’ll immediately smell the smoke, while you didn’t before you removed it. Exception: if someone is close enough to hit you with droplets when they speak (a foot or so), then a procedure mask is better than nothing.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    well, I'm a heavy smoker; I'm not troubled by other people's smoke, and I usually don't wear a mask while smoking :-) The last time I "gave up" smoking, I said to the doctor that I was expecting to get less winter colds. She said I was completely wrong, and that I should expect to get everything that was going around; that tobacco smokers maintain a lung environment that is hostile to anything living, including microbes, and that quitters can expect to catch everything that's going. I have no idea whether that was true. But I'm still standing - yeah, yeah, yeah.

joenot443 4y ago

> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. I wouldn't ever be able to trust a govt org again if it was revealed they'd made the decision to deliberately lie to their populace. There are few things that a government can do which is unforgivable, and brazenly lying to the faces of its citizens is one of them.

ethbr0 4y ago
> There are few things that a government can do which is unforgivable, and brazenly lying to the faces of its citizens is one of them. That's a pretty naive position and by its definition one shouldn't trust any government on earth. Government exists to provide glue for societies when individual motivation is insufficient or harmful. These situations are generally pretty serious (national health crisis, economic failures, intelligence, war) and thus require triage. "The first casualty when war comes is truth" isn't actually pointing to an absolute devaluing of truth: it's noting that suddenly there are many other goals that people perceive as more important than truth. E.g. preservation of national sovereignty, prevention of casualties, maintaining civil morale, etc.
- rajin444 4y ago
  > The first casualty when war comes is truth Most wars would not be fought if governments were trustworthy. And those that remain could be fought with full transparency. Trust is everything in society. When you start making exceptions everything falls apart.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Trust does create a post-scarcity society, and any government who fought a war with full transparency would lose (osint).

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times of crisis Tough decisions? Yes, lies - with a straight face? No. Now what? How can you do public health without public trust?* How can you govern effectively when the record showed you lied? The irony? I still see people wearing masks; the kind of mask that are proven to be ineffective. * On top of it we were assured these people were "the experts." However, this wasn't our first respiratory pandemic. Yet we were completely unprepared? What is their area of expertise? Lies? Publib health and government based on lies isn't sustainable. Yet anyone who questioned that was marginalized? It get worse and worse.

jefftk 4y ago

> there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders But they didn't do that either. They could have requisitioned the masks from private retailers, or just gone and bought them, but instead retailers continued selling them and the Surgeon General just tweeted at individuals telling them to stop buying them.

cokeandpepsi 4y ago

> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people Partly.. There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday. “There also is the issue that we have a massive global shortage,” Ryan said about masks and other medical supplies https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-recommendation-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-r...

darkerside 4y ago

> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. I hear this a lot. Do you have a citation? My impression is that nobody knew what was going on, underprepared officials jumped the gun with premature statements, and after the fact some people tried to rationalize the incompetence.

maxerickson 4y ago
The contemporaneous statements often mentioned shortages and preserving masks for healthcare workers. This Fauci interview in early March has him saying that he thinks masks aren't necessary at the time but also saying that he isn't against people wearing them (both things together at ~1 minute if you are impatient): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI This CDC transcript doesn't talk a lot about PPE, but it talks about directing it to healthcare workers that are at higher risk: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0303-COVID-19-update.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0303-COVID-19-updat... I'm sure there's stuff that looks worse if you go back through the 6 weeks previous to that, but early March is when things started to really happen in the US (I remember making a relatively large shopping trip that felt like it put me on the cautious side of things, and then the next week I started working from home). There's a lot of people saying that the government was saying not to wear masks, which is subtly different from saying that people don't need to wear masks, or that masks won't benefit most people. The surgeon general was out there saying they weren't effective for the general public, which is bad but still different from saying not to wear them. And I'm not sure it's entirely fair to attribute his comms failures to the CDC (they might have had a hand in it, who knows, but they don't control the surgeon general). Given how well people do with their masks (I still regularly see people wearing low quality masks incorrectly!), it seems true enough that they should be secondary to things like social distancing. I was sort of pleased and surprised a few weeks ago when my hospital was handing out N95s. Of course, it didn't matter much when half the patients had them under their nose (one confused lady had it sideways with the straps around her ears). They started self screening the next week, with only procedure masks available.
- 4y ago

AlchemistCamp 4y ago

> Single layer cloth masks do nothing. Really? If an infected person standing in front of you in a crowded room sneezes, you believe the risks would be unaffected by whether or not they were wearing a cloth mask? Whether their sneeze were blocked or droplets of spittle and mucus went spewing throughout the room, your exposure and that of people standing in distant parts of the room would be identical? In general I hate the “citation needed” forum response, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

arcticbull 4y ago
Into a single layer cloth mask correct it does nothing.

bee_rider 4y ago

From your article: > A better option, he says? Start with a two-layered cloth mask that has been washed, which gives it the capacity to filter better. If you want to go one step further in protection, use a KN95 mask, he says. So it isn’t like the suggested option is some esoteric thing that you need a 3M factory to make. “Single layers cloth masks don’t work” isn’t technically a lie but it omits that there was an alternative solution that was within the means of like… anybody with a sewing machine and a washing machine to make.

arcticbull 4y ago
There’s a reason I linked the study. I agree they work.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I can see the idea of guiding the public to not wear masks if it really is some zero-sum game where first responders lose if the public wears them. I disagree with this strategy due to the second order effects (reduced trust, later confusion), but it at least makes some sort of sense. I can’t see the logic of telling the public that masks don’t help, if it is possible for people to actually increase the supply of masks by making them at home. In this case it isn’t a small manipulation that doesn’t hurt anyone, but harmful misinformation.