This is particularly damning given that we're also now being told that a bandanna or any piece of cloth is a suitable replacement for a mask. Assuming that's true, it's pretty hard to justify lying to people about mask efficacy for the first several months of the pandemic. Would people have listened if they were told: masks work, but are in limited supply so use a bandanna and save the mask supply for front-line doctors? Probably not completely, I'm sure many people would still have gone out and bought masks impacting the total supply. Would it have been worth it, looking ahead, to not lie to people and degrade their trust in medical professionals, so that in the future when you decide to reveal the truth to people that masks actually do work they'll believe you? I think it probably was, but who knows.

> we're also now being told that a bandanna or any piece of cloth is a suitable replacement for a mask.

We are not. But we are being told it's better than no face covering, which is true.

You are, personally, wearing a mask though, right?

This is not exactly what happened. U.S. medical authorities really did not believe that basic masks, like fabric or paper surgical, offered significant protection. Thus they believed it was N95 or nothing, and they (correctly) wanted to save N95s for medical professionals.

They were wrong about basic masks, which is what we're all using now.

This feels like a re-writing of history. There was no nuance in what the US Surgeon General said, no mention of N95 vs. "basic" just "[masks] are NOT effective." Here's the full quote and tweet that still exists:

> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

> 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!

I get wanting the best interpretation, but there's a difference between that and just outright mischaracterizing what the message was from public health officials around Feb.

https://twitter.com/surgeon_general/status/12337257852839321...

I don't think this tweet conflicts with what I wrote.

Sorry I saw an interview where Fauci said that they knew earlier that masks would help but advised not to use them because hospitals needed the PPE. I can't find the interview, I did a search to find articles on it though.

https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-becaus...

He may not have known that regular cloth coverings would help but by discouraging the use of any masks he undercut his argument later.

Maybe - He was saying, they knew 95 masks would help but didn't know other masks would. Either way, it feels very dishonest.

Ok, you have perfect hindsight knowledge of the situation. Understanding that N95 masks were in short supply, knowing the virus wasn't particularly widespread, but more widespread than people realized and health care providers are on the front lines and dealing with it already. And the science on masks isn't fully understood either in terms of spread or protection.

What would you have done, what would you have said? What would have not been dishonest?

Also, what are you going to say so you aren't accused of: fear-mongering, overreacting, or being wishy-washy and providing useless guidance?

Taiwan CDC had perfect foresight knowledge of the situation, then. Of course, most US government agencies have massive Not Invented Here syndrome, but the answer was obvious. And funnily enough, Tech Twitter (the subculture) was full abuzz with this in March.

The idea that, in a situation encountering a SARS, that you wouldn't call the guys who beat a SARS is so fundamentally silly. Especially when they're ridiculously friendly to you. That's part of what I love about startups - every successful entrepreneur tries his best at learning from everyone else's successes and failures. It's not enough to learn by yourself, you won't get there in time.

So, no, I'm not surprised they couldn't do it because they have institutional cultural failure. I don't think I could do it at the CDC either because of the cultural failure (NIH, Perfectionism, etc.). It's hard to say, we'd have to see the nuances of power in CDC vs NIAID, whether it would be politically viable even for Anthony Fauci to call Chou Jih-Haw, let alone Tsai Ing-Wen etc., and governments aren't like companies where the CEO can just set up a team of people to bypass the normal structures and collaborate with Taiwan. The CDC and gang may be broken beyond repair. I think that's the best defence you can give them.

The truth...

I don't know if this is the interview that you are referencing but here is one place where he says it: https://youtu.be/GbfiqxDgOZ0?t=165

paucity - Scarcity; dearth.

I time stamped it to where he makes the statement after the political posturing.

The virus had not been well characterized at all, yet they were very certain of the opinions they expressed to the public. I can't forgive this.

It wasn't like they just guessed or anything. IIRC they had a test where people coughed into a petri dish with and without masks. The initial results showed that there was coronavirus on the outside of the mask, leading them to conclude that the virus is able to get through the mask. They weren't able to realize they were incorrect on their conclusion until they looked at the cultures a few weeks later and measure the amount of coronavirus in them.

I could be wrong on that, if someone is better-informed please correct me, but that's what I read somewhere.

EDIT: Just to clarify before I'm downvoted, I do actually agree they were a bit too hasty to tell people not to buy masks. Having the surgeon general tweet out saying "Seriously people, DO NOT BUY MASKS" was definitely premature and obviously led to a lot of the problems we're having here now. I just wanted to point out that it wasn't a completely unfounded take, just premature to make huge decisions like that.

I don't think this is fair; in real time you have to either go with what you think you know, or do nothing at all. If they'd done nothing at all, I think they would still be getting at least as much criticism now.

Why not advise to err on the side of caution until a meaningful quantity of knowledge is available?

This is an oversimplification considering that there were also drives to donate surgical masks and even homemade cloth masks to hospitals for use by professionals.

My sibling is a nurse; they put surgical masks over their N95s to protect them and try to help them last longer.

>> offered significant protection

Which, by the way, they do not if it's only the healthy who are wearing them or if people are wearing them with their nose sticking out above. And even if they did, C19 is now endemic, and without a vaccine (which might not ever materialize), everyone will get it eventually, if not now then 6 months from now. So lose that weight, deal with that blood pressure problem, manage your diabetes, while you still have the time.

As an aside, I find the response to C19 to be tragically (or comically, depending on your perspective) bad on the ground in almost all countries. Get this - one of the most reliable, easy to instantaneously test markers for whether you are _definitely_ infectious or not is _fever_. Contactless, accurate IR thermometers exist and could be deployed in arbitrary quantities. FLIR cameras also exist, and object detection algorithms can be run on-device in 2020 to identify the potentially sick people. And yet we do not measure people's body temperature when they enter public places such as a grocery store. It is well understood that we need to protect the elderly, yet instead of making it possible for the elderly to stay home indefinitely (by e.g. offering government sponsored groceries, or at least grocery delivery) we make them go to the grocery store. Several states went as far to thin the herd as to put C19 patients _into nursing homes_, which is absolutely insane. Medical personnel in some of those nursing homes is still not sufficiently isolated from the general population. Close to a half of US deaths are from those nursing homes - the statistic has been known for a couple of months now, but you won't find it in the press, for obvious reasons.

Why is this? Remember cringing when you had to vote for local candidates? People with little to no qualifications, some of whom (at least where I live) tell you in their candidate disclosure they're mentally ill? Those same people, after they are elected, go up the ladder, and some of them end up in the higher level positions in local and state governments. It's similar to Gell-Mann amnesia, in a way. They're still inept and insane. They're only there because other candidates were even worse. Yet people imbue them with some magical leadership and intellectual qualities they do not possess and rely on them with their lives.

There should really be "against all" option on the ballot.

IR body temperature scanners are actually not accurate, especially when used in public setting like a grocery store. Many infected people don't run a fever.

But they are _likely_ to run a fever if they are symptomatic. And between 100% "non-accuracy" of not measuring temperature at all, and some much higher level of accuracy of a non-contact IR thermometer, I pick the latter. I have one BTW, it seems pretty accurate to me (confirmed with a calibrated thermopair, unless you're trying to measure something reflective or transparent).

Cheap general purpose IR thermomenters from Melexis claim greater than +-0.1C accuracy in the common "body temperature" range: https://www.mouser.com/new/melexis/melexis-MLX90615-infrared...

South Korea did an amazing job, as outlined in this NYT article [1]. The thing I liked the most is my Korean map app had a new tab, showing me all the official mask distribution locations, and their real time quantities on hand.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/opinion/covid-face-mask-s...

I will say - I do understand why they did it, because nobody told anyone toilet paper was useful or important with the virus and look at how that went out of control. Just think if they suggested masks or even “face coverings” - people would definitely have saturated the market.

However it did suck as that helped cement some anti-masker excuses early on.

Hard to tell if there is any winning in that situation. :(

There will be lasting consequences of that lie for the rest of the pandemic probably for decades to come. There is a sizeable anti mask movement that gained significant ground because authorities told people masks didn't work despite the science saying the opposite, they even fabricated it as a scientific position further hurting belief in science itself.

Many governments of the world created an anti vaxxer like movement around masks just to protect supplies. They had to do so because they failed to act early enough and to follow their own recommendations for stockpiles of protective equipment. The consequences of those lies will be here for a long time.

Absolutely. This was a disinformation tactic adopted from the modern Republican playbook. Don't lie to people and then blame Republicans for lying to people. Reality matters. Intellectual hygiene matters.

It is very easy to politicize this, but it wasn't just the party in power: Supposedly independent healthcare organizations in the US gave outright and easily disprovable safety information for at least two months.

We had studies about similar airborne illnesses that showed mask's effectiveness, and while I am sympathetic to protecting key medical supply lines, they have done long term harm to public trust and mask adoption.

The anti-maskers we're seeing today are directly their fault.

Even now, we're still seeing misinformation about the difference between cloth and N95 effectiveness, particularly as the US has failed to ramp up N95 production after months of seeming inaction. Even healthcare providers are still struggling with PPE, let alone the general public or educators with the upcoming school re-openings.

While I agree with your point, there were also anti-maskers during the Spanish Flu, so these anti maskers aren't entirely the fault of the deception.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mask_League_of_San_Franci...

I agree that we'd always have some anti-maskers. But the level of it (seemingly mainstream) has been quite problematic (although the tide does seem to be slowly turning).

Despite my other comment (sibling to this one), I do regret mentioning Republicans and Trump. It wasn't necessary to make my point and was in poor taste and poor form.

> It is very easy to politicize this, but it wasn't just the party in power

That's what I'm saying. Non-Trump people took a move out of Trump's playbook. That's vicious.

> The anti-maskers we're seeing today are directly their fault.

I wouldn't go that far. Anybody who is still anti-mask at this point is just an anti-reality nihilist.

Speaking as someone who absolutely loathes Trump, a number of serious mistakes have been made by people including Dr. Fauci and Governor Cuomo that they are largely getting a pass on because they are being graded on a curve so to speak against Trump's complete failure.

It isn’t established that mandatory face masks is a worthwhile policy decision. I refer to the Swedish health authority for analysis of the current findings.

Ah downvoted without rebuttal, how cowardly.

I didn't downvote. I'll offer this.

This (the quote is from the Swedish health authority) was proven wrong yesterday. People touch their face less with a masks. Based on cctv studies in England.

"a face mask which is itchy and falls below the nose contributes to your hands often touching the mouth, eyes and nose which can increase the risk of infection"

The question is not simply “do masks have any benefit”, it’s “do masks have enough benefit to be worthwhile mandatory policy”.

There are many ways to deal with this pandemic, and it’s getting more and more “with us or against us”. This censoring that Twitter et al now engage in is very, very troubling.

> public health officials thought it was a good idea to lie to the public for months with vague dismissals of the benefits of masks - merely to protect supply chains for doctors

It was weeks, not months. By mid-march, conventional wisdom had shifted, as had most of the official rhetoric. This was before or simultaneous with most of the early lockdowns.

And it was wrong. But the real harm was caused much later when political actors started arguing not based on this early advice that masks were ineffective/harmful/tyrannical, or (even worse) that the expert advice now was not to be trusted because the experts then got it wrong.

Basically: the people who refuse to wear a mask aren't the ones slavishly honoring the whims of the WHO or Fauci, so I don't understand your point.