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...