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I totally agree that the "general public" has "limited focus," especially since public health campaigns are hard!

However, my claim is that a lot of progress on these issues doesn't need to be very public. Telling the public to do a thing sounds like the last step of the process, after researchers have already found a definitive solution.

I also agree that researchers have a limited amount of resources! But I don't think that funding a research area is necessarily zero-sum. If a company or government decides to throw extra money to start researching a thing, research on other things doesn't stop. As an example, when the NSF provides more funding for research, the number of PhD students goes up, since there are more research grants to go around.

I think there are different people working on each issue. There's no collective "they" that has to split their focus. The microbiologists and epidemiologists that could be studying long COVID aren't the same people that would be working on preventing youth suicide.

The key line from the study that that cites:

> The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions

Source: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

They asked people to wear masks, and they didn't wear masks, so they had trouble concluding things about masks.

This New York Times article prompted the Cochrane review to issue a statement:

> The Cochrane Review 'Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses' was published in January 2023 and has been widely misinterpreted.

Source: https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventio...