I think the CDC's original statements on masks (they aren't necessary, they're only effective at preventing the spread of COVID if the wearer has a medical degree, don't wear masks on planes, etc) contributed a lot to the distrust and politicization of mask wearing.
When you expect an institution to always be impartial and tell the truth, those sorts of white lies can quickly erode trust.
Please also note it is unnecessary to do any additional analysis to describe the example cited as a "lie." We know it was a deliberate lie because the then head of the CDC has said so [1] - unless he was lying about claiming he was lying there's not much doubt in that case. The CDC lie when it suits them isn't something that's really debatable.
Does it matter that they lied? This is the proposition that can be debated sensibly and rationally - but will likely be overwhelmed with emotion.
In my own observation there seems to be rather a lot of people who have almost no faith in their fellow humans and believe the only way "people" believe a thing and will act is because they have been told to believe it by someone. Misinformation takes all the blame in this paradigm. The populations is dominated by people who have outsourced their critical thinking.
It may be true, I don't know. But it seems to me to be really quite worrying if a population has to be told lies to get them to do the right thing or lies have to be censored because people will not be able to assess competing evidence and reject bullshit. Does it have to be this way? Was it always? Is it fixable? Is it really a thing at all? I have no answers there.
It's my observation that even in the service of "good", the debt to the truth always comes due and the interest rate is super steep. Many will disagree.
[1] Lack of PPE for medical professionals in the front line of pandemic response is the justification. This may well be a very good justification.
I know this gets repeated a lot, but that doesn't make it more true. Show me the quote where he said "we lied about masks", and "we changed our message about masks" doesn't count.
The reality is that the knowledge about Covid changed significantly in march/April last year. In particular the understanding about unsymptomatic spread lead to a significant change of thinking. That makes sense, if the virus only spreads from sick people, the advice for everyone to wear a mask is not good health policy especially if there is a shortage. You want to prioritise people who get in contact with sick people and prevent sick people to go out. However, if unsymptomatic people spread the virus, you want everyone to wear masks, because you can't prevent spreaders to go out. But the masks are different, you want cloth masks more than n95, because it is about protecting others.
The below article is one which elaborates on the whole discussion
2 weeks of asymptomatic spread has been known about since late January (edit: in 2020). [0]
And Fauci said at one point (2/14/2020):
“There is no reason for anyone right now in the United States, with regard to coronavirus, to wear a mask” [1]
And at another point (6/15/2020):
"[...] we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N-95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply." [1]
The director of the CDC during most of the pandemic was Robert Redfield. Dr. Fauci is director of the NIH, so his statements are not relevant to the credibility of the CDC.
In defense of Dr. Fauci's statement, saying "there is no reason right now to wear a mask" is quite different from "masks are ineffective", as it keeps getting paraphrased. The latter is obviously absurd, as there were numerous studies on the effectiveness of masks against various viruses prior to 2020, just not against SARS-CoV-2 specifically, since as far as we know it didn't exist yet.
Zeynep Tufekci published an excellent article about this. Her thesis is that medical dogma insisted COVID (and other infections) spread through droplets and not aerosols. Social distancing is enough to prevent infection from droplets because they don't travel far. That, it turns out, is wrong, and COVID can spread through smaller respiratory particles that can float, making social distancing alone ineffective.
I've read the article, I do just want to clarify the statement "making social distancing alone ineffective."
It's still true that if you are covid suceptible, and if a covid-shedding person is walking around, you should try to be as far as possible from the covid. But, a brief close pass e.g. on the sidewalk, isn't as risky as sharing a 20'x10' office for hours, even if you stay >6ft the entire time.
If the Wired article, which was downvoted to oblivion, is accurate then the WHO and the CDC (who parroted the WHO) bear a great deal of responsibility.
They shutdown scientists who were telling them that Covid was spreading as an aerosol, way back in early 2020.
The WHO now want MORE power, yet they’re not accepting accountability nor cleaning house.
The strange thing is that we have loads of research done over decades about all of this. It appears that the prominent doctors on the news don't know anything about it. Everything pumped out for publicity is about a sixth grade understanding of biology and epidemiology; but we know a lot more, it's just that Fauci doesn't talk about it and neither does the nightly news. If the role of journalists and the government was to inform, we would have well written articles on the loads of studies we have.
Journalists should give advanced information in digestible form about topics you didn't need to know about, but which are currently relevant. Instead, we get sixth grade hand waving in propaganda form.
Things like adaptive immune response, T-cells, immune escape, antibody dependent enhancement, viral loads, and lots of other things could be explained well but simply. It's a tragedy of modernity that we have so much information and so little understanding.
People can spend their entire lives studying one tiny aspect of our immune system; there are so many interacting, irreducibly complex systems that the average layman can be overwhelmed.
But there are simple things that can be explained visually. See, for instance, this video of Japanese scientists illuminating airborne droplets with green lasers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyZm6dx9Hss
Now, the contention here isn't that there are important concepts that should be explained to layman; the contention here is that there are important concepts that actual scientists need to explain to the decision-makers at the CDC.
> In defense of Dr. Fauci's statement, saying "there is no reason right now to wear a mask" is quite different from "masks are ineffective"
If masks are effective, that would be a compelling reason for someone to wear a mask. Saying there is no reason to wear a mask, strongly implies that they aren't beneficial to the individual wearing them. Fauci must have known that this is how people would have interpreted his statements. He should have said "there are very compelling reasons not to wear a mask", which is very different from "there is no reason to wear a mask".
I understand that Fauci had good intentions behind his statement. But it's very hard to regain trust after making misleading statements like the above.
It wasn't a "misspeak" it was a lie. He admitted it was a lie, and that he knew it was lie. If he wanted to give the Gov and CDC any credibility then he should have been honest about the need to reserve masks for health care professionals and urged people not to buy them and make home-made one instead. There is no valid excuse "I was lying for the greater good", that is bullshit.
I'm not a Democrat, which shouldn't really matter. I'm just relaying what actual surveys found, they were regularly asking questions about who was a trusted source of information on COVID and reporting on trends. Feel free to Google for them if you can't accept what I said as plausible.
Inefficacy of masks is a central point in anti-maskers message, and sometimes they would cite you the whole passages from official WHO/CDC advisories. And the belated reversal is just an additional point to "scientists don't know shit" attitude.
No, yeah it did tremendous damage. While there'd certainly be anti maskers without anti-mask hysteria by authorities, the scale would not be the same. It's hard to quantify but likely many tens of thousands of excess deaths globally are on WHO lies.
People were having difficulty providing evidence that Fauci admitted to telling a white lie elsewhere in these comments, yet it's widely believed by certain people that he did so.
There's a link to a factcheck in the comments that quotes what he actually said and it's not at all what many people in this thread seem to sincerely, but mistakenly, think he said.
So allow me to doubt that "anti-mask hysteria" was ever coming from the medical and scientific community unless I see exactly what you're talking about and evaluate it with my own eyes.
But I guess if we disagree on the facts, that helps explain why we draw different conclusions.
Do not confuse medical and scientific community with authorities. The ill advisory was coming from WHO and parroted by national authorities (including CDC). All while the efficacy of masks against airborne/pulmonary diseases was pretty much established. WHO is not a scientific body conducting independent research but a bureaucratic organization with heavy dose of politics.
However back in spring 2020 when the official position amounted to "a mask is a facehugger", arguing for using masks (including by medical professionals) was effectively impossible.
“There’s no evidence that wearing masks on healthy people will protect them,” Perencevich said, the publication reported. “They wear them incorrectly, and they can increase the risk of infection because they’re touching their face more often.”
I think we watched different versions of the Alien(s) franchise. Did they retcon that in the prequels?
Don't let that facehugger insert a parasite embryo down your throat! Why not? Well overall it would be more beneficial to society if frontline medical staff were wearing that facehugger while treating patients with confirmed or suspected cases of the virus. Oh okay, that seems sensible.
I honestly don't understand which bit of this quote, from your own source you don't understand:
“Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!” he wrote. “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!”
Is he saying that N95 masks don't work at all? That they only magically work for healthcare professionals?
Or is he very, very, clearly, even within the limited confines of a tweet, explaining that N95 masks are better allocated to frontline medical staff than being randomly worn by low risk people in low risk locations doing low risk tasks? That using those resources more effectively will save more lives and that people in those lowee risk situations can easily get protection by keeping a safe distance and following other sensible precautions that they list.
I can see how someone could intentionally misrepresent what he says, but I don't see an honest way to make that mistake.
I don't think I ever challenged the plausible intent of the lie (to avoid shortages). That does not stop a lie being a lie, with long term, serious harm.
The masks ARE effective in prevention COVID (both ways), and there is no demonstrated risk in wearing masks wrong. They lied on both accounts providing fuel to anti-masker movement. And yes the logical inconsistency of insisting masks are ineffective yet are necessary to frontline workers were pointed out year ago - you're not breaking any fresh ground here.
Nice way of taking both quotes out of context. The link I provided has the full quote. He was essentially saying what I said above: it is unclear if it makes public health sense for everyone to wear a mask, in particular we have a shortage of masks so we should prioritise health workers, there is nothing wrong with wearing a mask though.
Back in January 2020 for every medical authority saying that the virus is airborne there was at least one saying: We expect this to be similar to a harsh flu season at worst, at best the virus will burn out locally.
It takes time for knowledge to get formulated, broadly accepted, and turn into actual policy. It has to be like that. Most of the time, being prepared but doing nothing is the best thing to.
SARS, H1N1, Ebola + probably many others all burned out before they reached the west.
If scientists are looking at the same data and the same set of facts, then they cannot disagree.
Back when Hong Kong health authorities were warning about 14 days of asymptomatic spread, Chinese authorities had already placed multiple cities under martial law and set up concentration camps for infected people. It's absurd that the West was still in a "wait-and-see" mindset.
Was it a disinformation campaign from China funneled through Hong Kong or was it actually a breakout. We didnt know if the martial law was out of caution, China only reported 80k infections.
I think no. It erodes trust in medical institutions, and now we reap what was sown.
The same thing was done in other countries, including mine (Finland). Result: covid deniers are still using the year-old statements from national health agency to downplay the significance of masks.
"Masks are useless; the officials themselves say so", they quote.
Big mistake not to be honest, even if it leads to criticism against the government for inadequate preparation.
>even if it leads to criticism against the government for inadequate preparation.
There's your issue. Saying masks are in short supply begs the question of why. Whether it's reasonable or not, no politician wants to defend their unpreparedness.
If that was their reason, then why did the change the recommendation while still in the middle of the shortage? Here's an article from months after the CDC started recommending masks, showing that widespread PPE shortages among healthcare workers were still common[1].
There seems to be a lot of post hoc rationalization for what appears to simply be a mistake. This is why accountability is so difficult. People decide ahead of time that certain organizations or individuals are right. If it looks like they made a mistake, then there must be some good reason that justifies their actions that we just don't see.
Wasn’t the PPE shortage and the initial recommendation for the public to not wear masks both mostly about N95 masks? From what I remember, by the time CDC was recommending masks for the public it was all about the simple cloth masks, which I don’t think I ever saw in stores before the pandemic and presumably don’t compete much with N95 masks for medical professionals.
> the lie will be exposed and then your credibility is (rightly!) done for.
The wording here is good because we _should_ be skeptical towards any organization that is supposed to protect our citizenry, but unflinchingly lied to the entire population/world. Government has powers so that that it can control society. Why did the CDC need to lie and mislead people instead of finding a way to restrict the flow and supply of masks? The sad thing is that it would even be more forgivable if they were just completely incompetent and made a wildly incorrect guess. But they knowingly and deliberately lied in possibly the worst scenario to lie during.
What I’m saying is that this particular claim was not a lie, if it was true that the general public wearing masks would lead to a worse public health outcome due to a shortage of masks for medical workers.
Look it's always been known since the very early days of Wuhan crisis that masks will significantly reduce spread and risk (from past smaller pandemics & the nature of transmission of this virus). The various health organizations simply decided to prioritize supply for the medical community till production could ramp up by making statements that dissuade people from panic buying (as happened with say Toilet paper and flour later). While it's understandable, it doesn't make the early statements not "lies" and erosion in trust is a consequence.
> Look it's always been known since the very early days of Wuhan crisis that masks will significantly reduce spread and risk (from past smaller pandemics & the nature of transmission of this virus)
We have a lot of research into mask use, both to protect the wearer and to protect people around the wearer.
Can you point to any that you think CDC should have been using to support mask wearing in the general public?
You can argue about the level of evidence required (organisations like CDC strongly prefer well run meta analyses or a bunch of RCTs), but to say "it's always been known" simply isn't true.
I'd argue it has always been known that masks would protect both patients and wearers even from first principles and also how past pandemics with a less infectious virus were handled in Asia and from how common cold and flu dropped as a side effect.
The virus spreads via droplets exhaled or emitted from nose and mouth. What happens when something obstructs that flow - the % of droplets going in & out & velocity decreases and likelihood of transmission reduces. Why do you think surgeons wear masks - it's both to protect the patient and the surgeon from droplet borne infections.
What was unknown was whether it was economical to wear masks widely and whether there were supplies, not that it would work.
> Show me the quote where he said "we lied about masks"
The Street:
"So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?"
Fauci:
"Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."
If they didn't suspect that an "atypical pneumonia" as it was called since the beginning had an aereosol component a case can be made that they were unfit for their job
If mask initial recommendation actually was a white lie a case can be made that they are unfit for communicating their results to the masses as they think their peers to be petulant children unfit for handling truths, and they should be stripped of that function
The other cases just convert into variations of them politicising a pandemic to unknown ends
As for the WHO, these organisations shouldn't have an easy way out of their responsibilities
Im not saying what they did was right, but look at toilet paper. Obviously the masses cannot handle news that something is in short supply. The CDC knew that if they said, "masks work, there's not enough masks, don't buy them cause doctors need them" that 95% of America would hear only the first two clauses and go out to buy as many masks as possible. All the masks would disappear, there would be a panic and hysteria more than there already was, and doctors would end up worse off than before.
Look at the gas crisis in the south. It's obvious that enough of America truly _are_ "petulant children" as you say that they cannot be trusted with such information. Given an opportunity, the American people will choose to make the national situation worse, to improve their personal one.
I think the main disconnect here is that the CDC communicated like it's job was to say what was needed for the best possible outcome (and still made mistakes and miscalculations) while (some of) the people believe the CDCs job is to communicate the whole truth 100% of the time. We can see from looking back at literally any war or the 1918 flu pandemic that the populace is routinely lied to for the 'benefit' of the country. What is happening now is that we can instantly fact check and communicate to millions of people our opinions on what was said. I am not saying they were right to do it, but attempting to provide the framework in which is becomes believable that _they_ believed it was right to do it.
This advanced the short-term goal of keeping masks available to doctors at the expense of the long-term goal of maintaining their own credibility.
People tell me that I should trust those those who lie to me because at least their goals are honorable. I disagree. While it might be possible to lie to someone you trying to help or even someone you dearly love, it's pretty much by definition not something you do to someone you respect. I generally am wary of help from people who don't respect me.
Perhaps it would be helpful to have separate news channels for petulant children who need to be lied to so that they don't destroy civilization. Everyone else could watch the real news. Of course, nobody wants to be told they're a petulant child.
I’d say that what they did was right. The noble lie is by definition noble. The news media acting as (not always unwitting) accomplices is the real problem.
The “not aerosol“ hypothesis was based on the assumption that the spread rate would have been much higher than observed with an aerosol capable virus. Turns out this one just happened to be quite bad at spreading amongst humans, despite being capable of residing in the air for quite a while. It's rather unsurprising then that we now see many mutations that fix some low hanging fruit "bugs", bringing the spread closer to what people would have expected. Arguably hope may have been a factor in weighing that hypothesis, but that's truly nothing anyone should be blamed for.
Droplet is the "popular" middle ground. Contact is completely overshadowed by both types of air travel unless air travel is either completely out of the picture (non-respiratory viruses like various herpes) or if the virus particles excel at durability outside the body (e.g. the rhinovirus family, whereas being bad at this is an outcome of the defining property of corona viruses, they are short-"lived" almost by definition).
And droplet basically translates to: "yes, masks would help, but simply keeping a few feet of distance will be just as good". Unfortunately, distance does to aerosol transmission what soda cans do to a wildfire.
"Not to value and employ men of superior ability is the way to keep the people from rivalry among themselves; not to prize articles which are difficult to procure is the way to keep them from becoming thieves; not to show them what is likely to excite their desires is the way to keep their minds from disorder. Therefore the sage, in the exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens their bones. He constantly (tries to) keep them without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, to keep them from presuming to act (on it). When there is this abstinence from action, good order is universal."
- Dao De Jing, Chapter 3, The Chinese Text Project
I feel we are at the end result of "keeping those who have knowledge from acting on it". Misinformation is spread by people with the knowledge of how to control people and they tell people they are smart and they need to act.
I do not agree with Fauci's decision, but there was no other choice.
Look at what happened with the gas panic this week, it is the same thing was written about here:
Which leads to huge arguments which really benefits nobody as we just establish that we disagree.
Common sense seems to say that masks make s difference, but if that is the strongest argument, then why not let people decide for themselves using common sense.
Mere common sense? I wouldn't characterize it that way.
The wearing of masks to combat airborne disease spread is a decidedly not a new thing. That was never a novel concept, at least since the early part of the 20th century.
Coronaviruses in general aren't a novel concept either; we have a pretty good idea how they're spread.
So, when confronted with a new coronavirus, it's a little bit stronger than "common sense" to surmise that masks will be effective to some extent. The burden of proof would be on anybody suggesting that this virus is somehow so different than other airborne disease that the wearing of masks had no benefit.
then why not let people decide for themselves using common sense.
If masks are not effective, the downside to wearing masks was that we waste a relatively modest amount of time and money on masks and perhaps damage our credibility in the future when we recommend their use.
If masks are effective to some degree, the downside to not wearing masks was that millions of additional people would suffer and die worldwide, and we would incur a financial and human cost orders of magnitude greater than the modest cost of masks.
Common sense comes up with the wrong answer here. The individual benefit was likely very small. The cumulative effect over many weeks on buildup in cases is much larger.
There's a massive number of studies. A selection of 3 links out of 100+ would only reveal my biases. I'd rather just discuss my summation of the research and if there's something in particular you'd like to see, share that.
* Various studies of droplet propagation, which show well-fitting masks reduce droplets significantly. In theory, this should reduce spread.
* Many confounded observational and cohort studies tied to voluntary compliance with mask guidelines that show a lower risk of infection or secondary transmission. They are confounded because voluntary compliance with this measure increases the likelihood of general caution. Many show somewhat large effect sizes.
* Many population based trend-line studies/other ecological studies that show post requiring it as a public health measure in various environments, that daily case counts began to decline by .4% to 2.0% per day.
The studies in the second category showing larger effects are generally inconsistent with the third category, because the results in the third would be much bigger if the effect was real. And even the third category isn't great, because the mask requirement measures weren't instituted in a vacuum independent of other controls.
One of the studies was an ecological study comparing mask wearing rates in many locales (some with compulsory requirements, and some without) and their change over time vs. disease growth rates.
Another measured case growth in a hospital community where there was a very strictly enforced mandate for patients compared to the rate of case growth before, so compliance is a small factor.
It's very likely that masks help. It's also very likely that the effect is relatively small. But even a tiny effect can become a big one when raised to a big power-- 1.1^20 is 6.7x growth in cases, and 1.07^20 is 3.8x.
I'd have liked this guidance change in masks to come a week or two later. Keeping another couple weeks of somewhat sharper decline in cases means a lot fewer people affected through the rest of the pandemic.
Your conclusions here don’t really seem in line with your comment about still not knowing if masks work.
Not sure why you feel like this is a worthy hair to split.
This kind of attitude is why the western response could have been better. Western medicine is hews rigorously close to the “do no harm” ideal and interpret it that you need to have conclusive evidence before recommending a treatment, even something as harmless as mask wearing.
In Asian countries they just do it and so what if it hasn’t been demonstrated as a causal factor in a dozen studies.
Lay people see the indecision, the hemming and hawing, the hand wringing.
The cdc says shit like people shouldn’t wear masks.
This shit is actively harmful and thousands of people have died because of it.
We have confounded evidence of a weak effect. If I had to bet (and we all have had to), I'd say they do have a small benefit on a population scale. But if more evidence showed up saying they didn't, I would be completely unsurprised.
I think it's worthwhile to have doubt and be skeptical.
I'll note that, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was saying that masks may or may not work, but they should still be recommended at a time that the CDC was implying that they might even be harmful.
This is all completely consistent with what I originally said: "To be honest, we still don't really know if masks work. They look like they probably do something, but the evidence is weak and the effect size small."
Part of the problem is that the American media spread misinformation about the effectiveness of masks for political gain. For example, I remember the New York Times pushing the idea that vaccines would be less effective than mask wearing even though all evidence suggested that even a vaccine which met the minimum standards for approval would likely be substantially more effective than mask wearing, seemingly because Trump supported vaccines but not masks.
seemingly because Trump supported vaccines but
not masks.
I read both conservative and liberal media and have never seen it suggested that masks were somehow better than vaccines.
First I must strongly state that the idea itself makes no sense: one can wear a mask and be vaccinated; they're not competing ideas in any meaningful way.
However, at the outset of COVID-19, we certainly were not sure that there would be effective vaccines, or how long they might take to develop, or what their supply levels would be.
Therefore it made sense to take whatever (effective) measures we could, while waiting for a vaccine that was never guaranteed to exist. Nobody argues that a fire extinguisher is better than a squad of professional firefighters, but fire extinguishers can have important utility, especially while you're waiting for help to arrive.
As far as the Trump angle, perhaps you can show us a counter example, but I have seen zero evidence that anti-Trump folks have rejected vaccines because Trump favored them. It's a non-factor.
One, the liberal/progressive/whatever crowd is overwhelmingly pro-vaccination (in general) to begin with. Two, and perhaps more importantly, they're just not competing with masks in any way. Masks are imperfect; vaccines are more effective but also imperfect and not approved for all people even today. That is how you deal with many if not most threats in the real world: multiple layers of imperfect defences.
> they aren't necessary, they're only effective at preventing the spread of COVID if the wearer has a medical degree, don't wear masks on planes, etc
Everyone seems to also forget that a lot of this took place when they wrongly thought surface transmission was the main vector. The bigger problem was the delay in recognizing aerosol transmission, Chinese scientists cottoned on to this very early but the CDC and WHO dragged their feet.
We also saw everything play out and get politicized in real time in a way that's never happened before. There are lags between data and science, further lags between science and science communication and then even more from science communication to government policy. On one end of this lag you've got scientist warning of aerosol transmission, on the other side you've got Fauci still operating under the surface transmission advice leading to some very mixed messaging. Reducing this lag will be important in future.
> Chinese scientists cottoned on to this very early
China didn't even admit human to human transmission until mid January.
They haven't even admitted when the outbreak started, which almost certainly wasn't November 2019 since there are suspect cases in Europe already at the beginning of December, of people that had never been in Wuhan.
It's not a given, but it's also not a given that it originated in Europe or anywhere else for that matter. Plane travel makes it possible for a virus to be anywhere in the world on the same day.
> China didn't even admit human to human transmission until mid January.
Because it was even newer and more unknown at that point. Wuhan was in lockdown on the 23rd of January, so they had a pretty good idea by then. Meanwhile the rest of the world twiddled their thumbs and lost the opportunity to contain it.
> They haven't even admitted when the outbreak started, which almost certainly wasn't November 2019
How do you "admit" something unknown? Either way we know it couldn't have been too much before November/December, considering everything we know about how fast it spreads.
> How do you "admit" something unknown? Either way we know it couldn't have been too much before November/December, considering everything we know about how fast it spreads.
Actually, this is not so clear. The evidence of community cases in November/December in e.g. France were not picked up at the time either. There is a phase were a new disease can fly completely under the radar, because we are still in a very slow growth and only see a few isolated cases, which often don't even get seen by the same health professionals. This is particularly true in the case of covid were there is evidence that spreading is disproportionately from "superspreaders" (unless some of that information changed now?). So unless there was a superspreader, you only have few isolated cases.
It wasn't completely under the radar though. Doctors in China were thinking it was a "mere" SARS outbreak, which was fairly close to correct. However concern about public health was not the top priority of the govt.
Taiwan was pretty sure there was human to human transmission on Dec 31, 2019 after their secretary of health had been in Wuhan for a week or so, so China most likely had figured it out at least a month earlier. Maybe they hid it because were too busy jailing doctors?
The Dutch CDC (RIVM) made the same statements. As a result, people don't really believe in masks here either, but it not a big political issue. I am not sure why the mask became such a symbol for the corona measures in the US, but not here.
Your population no doubt trusts government a lot more. Also republicans here more or less turned trump into a Messianic figure and quit listening to science. It’s getting scary over here to be honest
It’s just that most people don’t really care about wearing a mask in a supermarket and those that do don’t really get bothered with it when they refuse. But it does polarize society between people who love pointing their fingers at others who don’t adhere to their favorite mitigation strategy (‘they’re killing grandma’, ‘If only they had done X’). And of course masks are a pretty visible virtue signal.
People are a lot more critical about the other rules, the curfews, the ban on outdoor dining and bars and the closure of sports facilities. And the ‘you can’t have more than one person over’ rule is generally ignored.
By the way the official Dutch position still is that surface transmission is significant and one of the three ‘main rules’ is to wash your hands a lot.
>I am not sure why the mask became such a symbol for the corona measures in the US, but not here.
Because Donald Trump wanted to downplay the potential scale of the pandemic, believing it distracted from his narrative of economic success playing into his re-election, so he attributed reporting on the pandemic to a "Democratic hoax," feeding into right-wing mistrust of the motives behind both mainstream media reportage and legal measures like lockdowns, which many considered unconstitutional and a pretext for installing a leftist police state.
Also because Trump refused to wear a mask publicly, considering it a display of weakness in front of the "liberal media" which he considered to be the enemy, and would often ridicule people who did wear a mask.
As a result, among Trump supporting Republicans, wearing a mask became associated with sheep-like submission to "leftist' (read: Democratic) authoritarianism, and not wearing a mask became a display of defiance along with the MAGA caps.
It is impossible to consider the phenomenon of the way masks are perceived in the US today outside of the context of the atmosphere of deep paranoia, polarization, mistrust of the press and "international" organizations created by the Trump administration, or the effect of conspiracy theories and misinformation spread across social media by QAnon and Trump supporters.
Seriously. I have explained this many times to my European friends. It is difficult to appreciate how people here will always want to push their own personal freedom of choice out as far as they can no matter how much someone else suffers.
This is unfairly downvoted. Much of the cultural indoctrination of Americans was to create a population that could go out and invade territory and commit genocide, which leads directly to this kind of antisocial behavior.
I had COVID in NYC in Feb, the only way to get a test was to claim you just flew from Wuhan. Which even if you did, I have no idea how they were setup to respond.
Everyone else in the hotel was sick, there was a tensor of coughing, all I could do was sit in my hotel room and watch politicians go back and forth about how we should all patronize stores in Chinatown and not be horrible racists.
All I can say is the is that the CDC performed extremely poorly in their response to this, over and over again. Mishandling tests, allowing the FDA to actively block testing. Even the pausing of the J&J vaccine was an extreme CYA blunder.
NASA had Challenger, NIST had Dual_EC_DRBG and the CDC had COVID. Not the same in scope, but the systemic dysfunction was similar in its structure.
Exactly this. I normally would agree with folks saying that the CDC has little reason to be dishonest, but with COVID in particular, we see enough historical reversal to cause at least some uncertainty around their guidance.
Plus, it also makes sense, if their and the government’s interests are for the greater good. E.g. being cautious about promoting early use of masks when supplies were scarce/preserving them for the front line medical workers.
Theoretically it would also make sense for current guidance to incentivize vaccines when the remaining unvaccinated population is hesitant.
To be clear, I’m not saying I have certainly that this is what’s happening. But the theories aren’t unreasonable, and CDC’s past reversal on guidance doesn’t help the confidence others have in their guidance.
Meh, I understand your point, but as someone who follows the conspiratorial world passively, I can tell you the whole 'but they told you masks were useless' thing is a post-facto rationalization to gain some common ground with the less conspiratorial people.
In reality, the usual suspects were pushing conspiracy theories about the CDC even before they determined masks were useful. A famous conspiracy peddler famously claimed the CDC was downplaying how bad the virus was and 'it was over for humanity, it'll only be lone survivors' when we only had a handful of cases in the US.
In other words: the CDC could've nailed every single guideline and we'd still have half of the population making up conspiracy theories about it. It's just too politically convenient.
> I can tell you the whole 'but they told you masks were useless' thing is a post-facto rationalization to gain some common ground with the less conspiratorial people.
So is the post-facto realization of "we knew masks work, we just didn't want the people to grab all the supply".
That's an oversimplification. The first thing to consider is that there's two types of masks:
* N95 masks
* Everything else
We knew N95 masks worked because that's what professionals use in hospitals. Unfortunately, there was a shortage of PPE so telling people to buy them would put them in direct competition with professionals treating very sick patients. In April 2020 we were looking at a really bleak scenario so there was a very strong incentive to keep professionals alive even if it came at the expense of some citizens (think: doomsday scenario).
We also had no idea whether 'everything else' helped at all. Recommending non-N95 use might have given people a false sense of security that might have played against more effective measures such as extreme social distancing and self-quarantining of people with symptoms.
As knowledge improved, guidance changed. Nothing crazy to see here.
As I explained in another post, originally the consensus was that only N95 masks were somewhat effective. There were no studies on the effectiveness of other masks.
Recommending people use masks could've given people a false sense of security in people and probably acted against more effective measures such as social distancing and self-quarantining of people with symptoms matching those of Covid-19 ('well, I know I have a cough, but I'll just wear a mask and it'll be fine').
Recommending people use the only masks we knew to somewhat work - N95s - would've created a huge problem for hospitals that already were having issues procuring PPE to protect the professionals who were dealing with Covid-19 patients.
Basically, there was no reason for the CDC to recommend masks. Again, there's no need for some nefarious explanation.
This, so much this! I had a friend (who unfortunately has become completely lost to conspiracies) tell me, that the German government was incompetent because they did not take the virus serious enough and that covid was overblown and much less severe than the flu, in the same argument! When I pointed out the contradiction he said "you just think there is a contradiction because you have been indoctrinated by the MSM".
The exact same thing is happening with the mask discussion. The people who say the CDC lied about masks and it was obvious that they help, are the same who strongly refuse to wear them because it's a security theatre. It's completely dishonest argumentation.
It's honestly been fascinating to watch the conspiracy world twist themselves into logical pretzels to fit their narrative to both reality and the political landscape. At some point, Alex Jones - who unfortunately is a weather vane for all the crap circulating in the conspiracy world - claimed the following within the span of a month:
* The virus is lethal and the government is hiding it
* The virus is just the common cold and tests are a conspiracy to make Trump look bad
* The virus is lethal and a conspiracy by dark forces to kill people
* The virus doesn't exist and people wearing masks are idiots
* The virus is lethal (again!) and a conspiracy by the Chinese to destroy the world's economy
It's no surprise that people who are marginally sucked into the conspiracy world have their brains completely fried by the constant narrative shift.
When you expect an institution to always be impartial and tell the truth, those sorts of white lies can quickly erode trust.