Regarding the masks, I went deepy down that rabbit hole in February and March. Most production happens in China. China didn't produce anything, needed what was there for themselves and had closed down a lot cities and ports and such. At the same time, demand increased by orders of magnitude around the world. hence the shortage. China didn't buy masks en mass from other countries, they didn't need to. A ,ot of fraud happened as soon as production resumed. No, people who, with a financial interest, tried to help sort out the shortage once the German government failed to do so, are sitting on tons of masks they bought in good faith for 5 - 10 times the normal price. Currently prces are down to roughly 2x the pre-Covid-19 prices. See the problem? People hoarding made the issue even worse.
Hordng mass during that period for retail sales or your own use, thus preventing PPE from getting to medical care professionals, is the deffinition of hoarding.
All of your mentioned institutions are publishing or using studies. Go look them up. But maybe accept that the people behind them know more about the subject than you do.
I don't know if China needed the masks, or if they needed to weld people in their apartments, but apparently they did that anyway. See for example the article "Billions of face masks sent to China during Australian bushfire crisis". This was happening around February.
Spiegel published an article in which a distributor of protection equipment got orders for months of inventory within a day from various Chinese customers. They also claimed that all the other distributors which they knew had a similar situation on their hands. In fact they got so many orders that they alerted the ministry of health about an upcoming bottleneck in procuring PPE.
Then there's the US: "U.S. exported millions in masks and ventilators ahead of the coronavirus crisis". $17.5 millions worth of masks exported during January and February.
And this is in addition to the hundreds of thousands in PPE they received as donations from all over the world.
The average Joe buying a 10 or 20 pack for himself & family is first of all not hoarding, as this is a very small quantity and secondly didn't cause the shortage.
The proble I have is, that now people accuse every institute or offical body of lying. Because they got, in people's minds, the mask thing wrong. Why can't we just accept that even experts can be wrong? Starting to accuse others of lying is the first step towards conspiracy theories, IMHO, as it only leaves black and white. And what is it that the WHO and co. have to be right 100% right from the start and everybody else is just asking questions?
It's mighty noble to donate to Italy after they confiscated all the inland mask production and bought tons of masks from everywhere else. And then they also pressured European politicians to prasise the communist party when receiving said donations.
Not every institute, just the WHO and to some limited extent a few others. Stop setting up this straw man, because that's clearly not the case for me and I listed some organizations which I do trust - because they've proven that they're competent.
Experts can be wrong, sure they can. But if their literal job is to protect us from such pandemic situations and they fuck up, they deserve some criticism.
If they persist in not recommending masks when already most countries are recommending them, like the WHO did until 1-2 weeks ago, they are uselessly incompetent and should be ignored.
I have much more faith in the KCDC for example and otherwise I want to see studies.
And anyway, people are unfairly accused of hoarding masks. It turns out that in the US, Australia, Germany (and probably other countries) China was buying up all the masks.