https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197121... (2016) on the role of (incidental) face coverings to prevent population-level disease at large gatherings.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190903134732.h... (2019) on the role of personal protective equipment on stopping contraction of respiratory disease (flu).
And to top it off: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/65/11/1934/4068747 (2017) meta-analysis, including a controlled section on effectiveness on population face mask use to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV.
We had the evidence.
[0] https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2020/06/17/fauci...
For example, take the South Korea section in this article about how Europe is failing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-54482905 It starts off by attributing their success to "mass testing and strict contact tracing". In reality, South Korea is testing at about a tenth the rate of a typical European country (10-20 thousand a day), doesn't routinely test people with mild potential symptoms, and has no way of reliably detecting cases that don't have links to ones they know about - which have been appearing in increasingly alarming numbers. Technically, "tests have always been easily available" as the article says, but they successfully discourage most people from getting one by charging for them under most circumstances. They don't even appear to be trying to improve this either; their testing capacity seems to be at the same level it was in like March.
As for the strict contact tracing, this sentence hides a multitude of things: "the majority of people have accepted it and prioritised controlling the pandemic over their own privacy". I'm sure the people who didn't have the entire internet speculating that they were cheating on their partner, and aren't being criminalized for refusing to out themselves as gay to their homophobic employer in a country with no legal protections, and don't oppose the government, have no problem with it. Something tells me that the BBC would be infinitely less willing to put a positive spin on screwing over a minority of people like that in the name of the greater good if the UK or US government did it though.
The article goes on to downplay the other restrictions. "When infections rise, stricter measures are put in place", the BBC says, but makes it sound a limited, mostly brief and long ago thing: "At one point there was a 21:00 curfew on restaurants in the capital, Seoul. But now, social distancing guidelines are back to their lowest level." In reality, they'd literally only just dropped social distancing meaures to that level and allowed bars in Seoul to reopen right before the article was published: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-southko... It's still too early to even see the effect of this on cases. That bar closure was also imposed only two weeks after the previous 9pm curfew and complete ban on indoor dining/drinking in Seoul establishments was lifted. If the UK did this, there'd be endless BBC headlines about U-turns, confusing, seemingly arbitrary measures, and speculation as to whether businesses would survive - not this kind of attempt to minimize the extent of the measures. Especially the part about night clubs reopening; South Korea has tried this at least twice and had to do almost immediate U-turns both times, and there's no reason to expect they can manage it now.
I suspect the BBC would also have plenty to say about (for example) the flu vaccine screw-up if it happened in the UK: http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20201015001058 They've certainly put enough of a negative spin on the fact that the UK doesn't have enough flu vaccines immediately to deal with unprecidented demand and the implications for the fight against Covid-19, even though there's nothing the government could really do given the lead times. But because it happened in the supposedly more competent success story country, most people will never hear about it and the illusion that our government is just incompetent compared to them will remain unchallenged.
From what I remember the message very early on wasn't that masks don't work, it was "save the masks for the front line workers"
If you search Google news for "masks" between February and March you can see where the surgeon general and others were saying that masks may increase the likelihood of infection because of touching your face.
That is something else than people saying now that there is no evidence that masks help, because now we have evidence.
Moderators watching videos is optional.
> In an interview on Fox News' "Fox & Friends" on Monday, Adams said wearing face masks could actually increase a person's risk of contracting the coronavirus.
> "You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider," Adams said. "Folks who don't know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus," he added.
> Adams' comments Monday reiterate his blaring tweet from the weekend, urging people to "STOP BUYING MASKS." He said that they were "NOT effective" to the general public and noted that the increased demand in masks puts medical professionals at risk.
> The World Health Organization joined TikTok last week to provide accurate information about COVID-19. In one of two videos posted, it explained most people should not wear masks and provided instructions for how to properly wear one.
https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-dont-need-masks-pe...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t...
> The meta-analysis itself avoided drawing any conclusions at all, and would not even admit that N95 respirators worked.
I mean, either you believe the science or you don't. You don't get to complain that it didn't support your preconception.
> According to intention-to-treat, the studies unanimously found masks to be useless. But there were a lot of signs that intention-to-treat wasn’t the right choice here.
Not a great sign.
> In other words, respirators are better than masks are better than nothing. It would be wrong to genuinely conclude this, because it’s not statistically significant. But it would also be wrong to conclude the studies show masks don’t work, because they mostly show respirators don’t work, and we (hopefully) know they do.
He's a fucking idiot.
Because Asian countries were basing their advice on science and the US was basing the advice on what would poll well with Republican voters who believe individual freedom is more important than community welfare. The US absolutely did have access to all the science, and chose to (temporarily) ignore it in order to try to gain votes the presidential election.
If Asian countries had been going in to an election and courting votes from a strongly conservative base their advice would have been different.
I was in favor of masks (might have helped since I lived in Asia previously), and debating people early on about the usage. I don't know about now, but there was a lack of published evidence on non n95 masks, and even the use of n95 masks were debatable because of fit tests.
As someone else pointed out, this is what Sweden says to this day.
"The scientific evidence around the effectiveness of face masks in combatting the spread of infection is weak, which is why different countries have arrived at different recommendations."
I doubt the Swedes are trying to sway the US election.
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency...
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/japan/
The science you are referring to is very weak. The only randomized trial on cloth masks was completed in 2015.
Actually for the most part this isn't true, our government was also telling us to wear masks but because of our previous experience with SARS everyone wore them anyway. Now of course it is illegal not to wear one.
It was the WHO who repeatedly stated that healthy people shouldn't wear masks, or close borders for that matter, and most politicians across the world didn't question that. And why would they, it's the job of the WHO to understand the science for us.
(If anything, Trump was initially harder on COVID than most by pushing for travel restrictions. At that time it was the Democratic NYC establishment that put individual freedom over safety [1], the two positions only flipped later on.)
The initial response, especially by the WHO, was an absolutely disaster. Asian countries did better than the US and the West in general because they _didn't_ listen to the 'experts'.
[1] https://twitter.com/billdeblasio/status/1234648718714036229
Why didn't we have the science? Respiratory infections aren't new. I remember debating people early in the outbreak about the use of masks and they were pointing out that there was little scientific evidence on the use of masks, especially non n-95.