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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

The other truly painful move was to discourage the wearing of masks.

The US Surgeon General, on March 28th, was on Twitter insisting that wearing masks was contraindicated unless you're coughing or sneezing, or taking care of someone with a confirmed infection. [0]

He tagged the WHO and CDC, because he was following their advice.

This wasn't deliberately calculated to kill tens of thousands of people and destroy the economy through harsh lockdowns when people started getting really sick. It just... happened to have that effect.

[0]: https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12440202923658158...

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The WHO still only recommends them if you're in close contact to people who likely have COVID-19.

> This wasn't deliberately calculated to kill tens of thousands of people

I haven't seen any data on how much more effective masks are (and which masks) than social distancing. As a sibling pointed out, they might give people a sense of immunity, they might cause people to touch their faces more, etc.

In the Bay Area, they became mandatory-ish after new cases peaked. The only reasons to mandate them at that point is to either get people used to wearing them early or because it makes you feel like you're doing something.

And the WHO is still wrong about that.

Taiwan is where we should be looking for inspiration, with South Korea a close second. Taiwan has been manufacturing 20 million masks a day for their citizens, and has been able to contain the pandemic without shutting down their society.

Granted that they have a water border, and were early and aggressive about contact tracing and so on. But the burden is on those who have wacky theories about moral hazard, or who wish to argue from the authority of the WHO, to demonstrate why their specious violation of common sense should apply.

As for the Bay Area, well, they're not the first government to close the barn door after the horses escape. What would things look like if they hadn't listened to the CDC and WHO for as long as they did?

We'll never know, but more like Taiwan is a reasonable guess.

Encouraging people to wear masks is extremely controversial. It encourages people to think they have some form of immunity walking about and going places where they otherwise wouldn't have without the false sense of security provided by a mask.

Westerners somehow have this weird preconception that those masks are protecting the wearer. No, they are protecting bystanders by reducing the reproduction factor of the disease. With exponential growth even means with low effectiveness can have a huge impact.

We seem to have lost the ability to think in terms of collective benefit, if we ever had it.

Wearing masks and going places are two different thing. Wearing masks should be encouraged early and it could have saved many lives here in US. It's kind of surreal now to think about ppl in crowded cafeteria or pubs back in early Feb where the community spread started. It's a fact that wearing masks is slowing down the spread by as much as 80%. It's not exact immunity but it could have saved many ppl from getting the virus into their system

Do you have a source for "It's a fact that wearing masks is slowing down the spread by as much as 80%."? There's studies that measure the amount of droplets/aerosol that gets through but I haven't seen any studies about how it affects infection rates.

Is there any actual data on this, or is it just one of those things that sounds true so it gets repeated? It seems just as likely that wearing masks would make people more aware that things are not normal.

Discouraging use of actually-effective measures because they make people less risk-averse is dangerous nonsense. Use the measures and then find some other way to affect behavior.

Personally, I have no problem with people wearing masks, scarves, bandanas, or whatever when they're in relatively crowded areas like stores. It seems uncontroversial to say that it doesn't hurt (and may help)--leaving aside some of the supply issues for actual medical masks. But, yes, people should assume that the benefit is probably marginal and not treat masks as a superpower.

Very likely to help https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2007800

Which doesn't really say anything about the effect on transmission of the virus/effect on infection rates especially between people are not in especially close quarters.

To be clear, I'm certainly not against people wearing face coverings but I'm skeptical it does much good.

This is exactly why I don't wear a seatbelt or use condoms. Wouldn't want to have a false sense of security.

I initially, when countries here (Europe) started recommending masks, thought that was a good idea, but having seen now how people use masks I definitely know where the doctors that said "people are going to touch their face more due to masks and that's the last thing we want" were coming from. So, I am not sure any more that earlier mask usage would have helped.

The benefit of masks is primarily that it reduces droplet transmission from carriers, many of whom are asymptomatic.

You can't propagate a droplet to your face by touching a surface and then your mask, if it never lands on that surface to begin with.

I'd really like to do away with this misconception: masks are primarily to prevent transmission, and only secondarily (and it's a distant second) to prevent infection.

Where did I say the primary purpose was to prevent infecting yourself? It doesn't help if they reduce transmission, if they increase the risk of infection at a greater rate. "It never lands on that surface to begin with." is a flawed assumption. You see people taking off/adjusting masks all the time because someone on the phone doesn't understand them, they want to eat something, etc ... or they retie the scarf they use as a mask and don't care which side is the "outside" ... and then go on to touch stuff in the store, and then again their masks ...

Like I said, I used to think it was a good idea, and now I've seen lots of people using the masks.

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