I'm from Norway. Here a quote from one of the largest news outlets[1] mid February 2020 (my translation):
Face masks have little effect on preventing infection among the population and can in some cases contribute to increasing the risk of infection, says Hanne-Merete Eriksen-Volle, section leader at the National Institute of Public Health.
So not only did they say masks don't work they went one further and said masks can be bad. They harped the same message for several months until they did a 180 and said everyone should wear masks.
To me, this was a huge failure in communication which highlighted a severe lack of ability to communicate with the public in our health sector.
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/fhi_-munnbind-gir-falsk-trygghet...
Probably as intended. Governments are not above outright lying about these matters when it suits them. Several years before covid the German government tried to push a flu vaccine (was it pig or bird flu?), politicians across the board vouched for its safety, some even got theirs on camera. It didn't take long for someone to leak the orders and distribution plans that clearly showed that politicians would not get the cheap, mass produced vaccine which was rushed out and stretched with various questionable additives to scale that everyone was worried about. Every single politician that made a show of getting vaccinated got a vaccine reserved for critical government positions as its production could not be scaled to cover the population. I think in response politicians started to blame the press for sabotaging the vaccination effort, when they could have avoided the whole issue by just taking the normal vaccine like everyone else, not a single one of these assholes was in any way "critical" to the day to day operation of the nation but they had to conspire to give the impression that the normal vaccine wasn't good enough for them.
It's actually 0.3 micrometer particles that are most difficult to filter. Smaller than that, particles start to dance around and not move smoothly, because of Brownian motion, so they get stuck in the filtering fibers better.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-filter-efficienc...
[1] https://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/documen...
No, there was no nuance here and everyone in this thread is mis-remembering or mis-understood what actually happened.
Masks don't work against COVID. They never did. They don't reduce viral load or anything else either. In fact there was no evidence of masks doing much of anything in the scientific literature pre-COVID (post-COVID it's been polluted by terrible and invalid post-facto rationalization studies). Fauci/CDC/the entire public health community knew this and were saying so explicitly in private emails to each other, as well as in public. This wasn't just a US thing, every country was doing the same thing. UK public health officials were also saying masks didn't work for example.
This was not because they were worried about a shortage, as their private emails made clear. It was because there was genuinely no evidence they could point at to support masking everyone. The moment they realized nobody in power cared about evidence anymore and they could do whatever they wanted, suddenly the masks came in. How to explain their previous stance? Oh, it was a noble lie for the greater good.
Problem is, it wasn't - the idea of the noble lie is itself the lie. Very confusing, admittedly. But also, it should really be obvious that it's a lie:
1. It's very easy for governments to control imports and distributions of masks (they were virtually all imported from Asia back then). If you actually believe health care workers should be prioritized, lying to people for months in the hope they believe you and then reversing your position is the absolute worst way to do things. Imposing customs controls at the ports is the best way.
2. Anyone who paid attention to case graphs can immediately see that they don't change even a tiny bit when mask mandates are added or removed. See [1] for a few examples but there are hundreds more.
[1] https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...
This would be absolutely shredded in a scientific paper, which is why it's a blog post rather than part of the literature.
How much impact can we see at the time of introduction and removal? Zero. In all those graphs the curve continues exactly on its previous trend line.
Your point would be valid if there was a visible impact and we were trying to establish how much of that came from masks. But we aren't trying to disentangle cause and effect here, because there's no effect to establish a cause for. If there's no effect then masks cannot be the cause, can they?
If they truly worked to a level that justified their use, I’d expect it to have made a massive impact on important metrics. Thus far, I see no evidence of that. You can compare the trajectory of various geographic regions and they all follow the same basic shape in the same ball park regardless of policies in place.
No, not in the slightest. The evidence wasn't perfect, but you have to operate using the best working evidence you have. It's logical that face coverings reduce spread of a virus spread primarily through respiratory droplets. The experimental evidence also supports it.
The downside, of people being mildly inconvenienced by wearing a cloth over their face, is tiny compared the risks of your health systems getting overwhelmed. The disturbing thing is that we did not initially err on the side of caution.
> I’d expect it to have made a massive impact on important metrics.
It doesn't have to have a massive impact to be useful.
> You can compare the trajectory of various geographic regions and they all follow the same basic shape in the same ball park regardless of policies in place.
"Same basic shape". What, you mean up then down, as new variants emerged, and seasonal effects were encountered? How are you assessing that they are the same shape? Have you done an analysis against all countries with reliable data or are you eyeballing the graphs from a few cherry-picked regions by a blogger?
You're making two mistakes here, that mask advocates frequently make:
1. At the time this decision was made there was no evidence that masks would have any effect. That's why public health officials around the world were saying they'd have no effect. It wasn't a noble lie, they were actually telling the truth about masks at the start and we can see that by simply searching the literature for evidence masks are effective that predate March 2020. Thus there is no justification for this policy given evidence based decision making.
2. Your claim about what's logical is predicated on the belief that COVID spreads through large droplets of water. This isn't how it works. COVID spreads like a gas, against which masks are useless.
> The downside, of people being mildly inconvenienced by wearing a cloth over their face, is tiny compared the risks of your health systems getting overwhelmed
If masks don't work then the risk of health systems being overwhelmed is irrelevant. And they don't work, that's the point you keep trying to avoid.
But equally as important: the downsides of the policy are far, far greater than "minor inconvenience". If you really believe that's the only downside you have no business forming opinions on health matters at all.
Firstly: wearing masks is unnatural and not surprisingly, doing that for too long breaks things. Things like children.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1592670/covid-news-babies-...
The UK education regulator has just issued a report about delays in babies development and struggles with responding to basic facial expressions. They say “Children turning two years old will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly.”
There are certainly many other problems, think of the enormous trash problem it creates too.
Secondly, the policy is incredibly destructive in other ways. The entire population spent the last two years being forced to go along with an obviously incorrect and pointless rule, along with absurd caveats like restaurant physics. It's utterly destructive to people's confidence in public health and the ability of governments to make rational decisions. If anyone ever needs any reason to doubt public health ever again, about anything, masks is all the justification they'll ever need.
Nonsense. The virus spreads primarily through salivary droplets. Please don't peddle this rubbish.
There is some aerosol transmission, but most infections happen at short range. Masks aren't perfectly effective but they do help, and that has saved lives.
If you don't even understand the basic science then educate yourself before commenting.
If you want more evidence, try:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16696450/
SARS-1 spread through an apartment building by using drain pipes. No droplet transmission is capable of that. For SARS-CoV-2 the same thing happened on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. People were locked in their cabins, yet, the virus still spread through the ship without difficulty. This was very early evidence the spread-through-droplets theory couldn't be correct, but was ignored by public health.
Again, absolute nonsense.
World Health Organisation:
"Current evidence suggests that the virus spreads mainly between people who are in close contact with each other, for example at a conversational distance. The virus can spread from an infected person’s mouth or nose in small liquid particles when they cough, sneeze, speak, sing or breathe."[0]
> People were locked in their cabins, yet, the virus still spread through the ship without difficulty.
No one is disputing that the virus spreads through aerosol distribution. The majority of spread is through salivary droplets. Is your argument seriously that because there is some aerosol spread, that somehow disproves the model that spread is mainly through salivary droplets?
If you are unable to understand the argument I don't see how we can continue the conversation.
[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/cor...
The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly
The US and other countries faced a mask shortage at the beginning of the pandemic. Masks don't provide absolute protection, but they do reduce viral load exposure (apologies if I got the terminology wrong here), which influences how bad the infection can become.
So, what you want is for the available masks to go to the people most likely to be exposed to high viral loads, i.e. health care workers.
The message the CDC and others attempted to get out was more or less 1. masks don't provide complete protection (which they don't), 2. they do reduce load exposure, so 3. please stop panic buying/hoarding masks until supply chain issues are worked out.
What people actually heard was 1. masks don't work (at completely preventing an infection), which many of them simplified to "masks don't work". It also didn't help that the US Surgeon General at the time went on television before getting his talking points figured out.