The population is completely confused and feel righteous anger now telling people off when they wear professional (medical disposable, or ffp3/n95) masks to go shopping or elsewhere. It's insane.
And then in many Asian cultures it's considered a moral failure to not wear a mask in these times, yet hospitals function. This problem clearly isn't universal, or inherent in capitalist functioning.
It's propaganda. It is reasonable propaganda as having to have actual PSAs on how to sew your own masks or make them out of materials at home would really start ramping up the general anxiety.
They should've instead:
* Banned sales of masks to the public until healthcare and other essential workers had enough stock.
* Honestly conveyed the reasons for the above ban, in WWII-style "do your part" advertisements etc.
* Encouraged homemade cloth masks, bandannas, etc. to reduce the spread of droplets.
* Ramped up surgical mask production to get supply to the general public as soon as possible.
(another 1/3 don't care because the system doesn't affect them, until it does)
And I guess the opposing 1/3 just don't understand the difference between positive and negative rights?
Healthcare, as a matter of fact, does represent a collection of products and services, and access to those products and services represent a positive right because it requires somebody else to provide something for you.
It is only negative rights, those which define what other people can not do to you, that should be considered inalienable. The right to free spreech doesn't require somebody else to go to school for 20 years so that you can express yourself, they just aren't allowed to prevent you from doing so.
Intentionally or not, people like you confuse the issue by treating both positive and negative rights as the same, and actually do not seem to understand, or are avoiding acknowledgment of the fact, that treating a positive right as some kind of natural right carries the high potential that you will be demanding access to another human being's labor or resources against their will, and in America, 1/3 of use are against the enslavement of others.
But trust is hard to gain and easily lost. A real compounding factor in this crisis is also that our leaders have lost all credibility. In many, if not most, countries, the citizens just know that actions that were and are being taking are neither competent nor in their best interest. The specific implementations of democracy we implemented never selected for reason, precaution nor long term benefits or well-being for all.
So most of us have a political 'leadership' (and I do not mean a specific country or party, it's mostly across the board, with few exceptions) that has lost all credibility, trust and moral authority long before this happened, leaving the population already at best confused, but mostly mistrusting and (justifiably) cynical.
For scientists to go 'on message', telling obvious non-truths, just further undermines the already shaky ground they were on after decades of anti-science propaganda.
I really, really hoped they would refrain from this, but, judging by what is happening in my own country and what the science community is publicly communicating (privately it is a completely opposite discourse), I sadly must say that the opposite is true.