I thought the expert advice from the WHO is to not wear a mask?
> There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly.
Do you know better than the WHO?
Shouldn’t we be going with data rather than ‘common sense’?
Other times that hasn't happened yet and you still need to make a decision about what to do today, not after six months of further study.
IIRC the CDC recommended against early on, I don't know about WHO or where CDC stands on it now. But interviews like:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/not-wearing-masks-pr...
from other experts give reasons why it is effective:
Q: What mistakes are other countries making?
A: The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks. This virus is transmitted by droplets and close contact. Droplets play a very important role—you’ve got to wear a mask, because when you speak, there are always droplets coming out of your mouth. Many people have asymptomatic or presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others."
// end of interview comment.
Could it be that CDC knew knew masks worked, but didn't want people to stockpile them? Or could it be that most people won't wear them effectively? No idea which, or both.
I believe the right thing to do is to ramp up mask production and try to get a very small number per capita (after healthcare workers have sufficient) to the sick and general population, especially around areas like NYC. Then educate people on how to wear them.
Apparently.
The one thing I learned from this pandemic is to distrust scientists at the WHO and the CDC and to read the primary literature directly. These folks are far too involved in politics.
Better "trick" the public then.
Doing this really seem like a much better way to handle the situation than giving a really really dangerous false advice like this.
Obviously there's a need that's not being met, but it's nearly two months since masks became hard to acquire.[0] Can we not change the official recommendation to "make a cotton mask and wear it if you go out for groceries; here's a template. Don't use N95 masks, instead donate them"? It would be great to have numbers on this.
[0] anecdotal, Bay Area.
Looks like mask production has been ramping up since January, at least. But numbers of the big picture would be neat to see. https://www.wired.com/story/surreal-frenzy-inside-us-biggest...
Seems to me that the biggest problem we have is lay people thinking they know better from reading random isolated papers without context and doing their own thing against advice designed to make everyone safer.
It's bewildering the US and European guidance on this.
Edit: read this carefully: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2843947/ It will apply to SARS-CoV-2
Frankly, you don't need to be 'qualified' to read review articles in this area--I encourage any logical citizen to do so. Specialist articles?...sure, it's unlikely you will gain much from reading those.
There is ample scientific evidence that masks work both to prevent being infected and to prevent infecting others.
The argument seems to be "there is sufficiently low risk from normal daily activities that it's not worth wearing a mask." If that's the case, why can't I leave my house except for groceries? How did all of those people catch this thing if the risk is so low? The reality is that the risk for everyone, given the severity of COVID is high. The risk for healthcare workers is beyond extreme.
From what I gathered from their guidance the basically say masks are not effective enough to protect you & people do not know how to use them.
Well, the problem is that how well the mask protects you is at this point int time actually a secondary concern. The biggest issue is protecting others from you when you are infected and do not know that yet, which is a very big problem for covid-19 due to many asymptomatic carriers.
Even a piece of cloth covering your mount and nose can reduce the amount of infected droplets you generate be sneezing and breathing significantly if not totally stop transmission barring really close physical contact, so there is really no good reason for everyone not to wear a mask.
That WHO is totally neglecting this aspect of the mask protecting others is almost criminal negligence.
Why give them to nurses and doctors then? It would suffice for the patients to wear them. If they do work at protecting you, then let's say a patient can't wear one, should you wear one? The answer is yes. Therefore the only logical conclusion is that an N95 mask protects you.
As far as I can tell, they are not saying anything about the other much more important aspect of masks protecting others when everyone wears them.
And that's in my opinion very very wrong and is most likely already costing many lives...
They say there is not enough evidence to back up the idea that the general population wearing masks has a benefit to everyone.
> There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t...
> Some people with swine flu travelled on a plane from New York to China, and many fellow passengers got infected. Some researchers looked at whether passengers who wore masks throughout the flight stayed healthier. The answer was very much yes. They were able to track down 9 people who got sick on the flight and 32 who didn’t. 0% of the sick passengers wore masks, compared to 47% of the healthy passengers. Another way to look at that is that 0% of mask-wearers got sick, but 35% of non-wearers did.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689
> ...the vice president of Taiwan, a prominent epidemiologist, gave regular public service announcements... These announcements included when and where to wear a mask, the importance of handwashing, and the danger of hoarding masks to prevent them from becoming unavailable to frontline health workers.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258525804_Testing_t...
I'm not convinced masks help either way.