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The problem with lying is that your intent doesn’t matter, you still lied, and in a society that is built on gradations of trust, you’re trading against your own credibility every time you lie. You don’t get a discount on the price of your lie simply because you were acting in a paternalistic manner, in fact, Officers and employees of the government taking a paternalistic position makes their lie worse and increases the cost to their own credibility in the long run.
However, lots of people don't trust (various types of) "authority". And for them, the lie is further proof of their prior lack of trust.
It's a hard problem, which has been made a lot worse by the politicising of masks, in particular.
My own prior is that Asian people have been wearing masks for many years, and I am inclined to believe that masks are (somewhat) useful. However, there's been so little research on mask-wearing by the general populace that I am deeply uncertain about those benefits.
It is one thing for us as laymen to discuss the efficacy of masks, staying at home, shutting down the economy, not partaking in the activities we used to enjoy and so on. It is an entirely different thing for a person in some kind of authority, like "public health", where your primary domain of expertise is communicable diseases to step out of their lane (which is communicable diseases) and say despite the supposedly high risk of death and bodily destruction that an apolitical virus with neither vices nor virtues nor policy positions can wreck, it is entirely okay to go out and protest something, but only if it is something that "we in authority" currently agree is worth protesting. This is, by the way, not long after the 9th Circuit said allowing Churches to reopen (even with limitations) would make the Constitution into a suicide pact.
People don't trust authority because authority doesn't want to stay in its own lane. Take Anthony Fauci, he has done a remarkable job staying out of the fray as much as possible and simply acting as an advisor to the President and to the people, and people trusted him even when they wanted to imagine their own politics on him. As a civil servant, absolute standout guy, and he's now considered one of the most trusted medical professionals in the country because he stays in his lane, meaning he allows his politics to take a backseat (not even the backseat, it's back in the trunk) to his job and Office (Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases).
Forgive me, I went on a small rant, but to conclude, when you have lying in the first instance and not staying in your lane in the second, one of the effects is going to be a loss of credibility, and that's both just and understandable. Choices have consequences, and that includes lying, and that includes using your unelected Office for activist purposes. Even when you're right about something, up to and including the efficacy of masks, you've already lost credibility, and in the case of masks, you've already directly contradicted yourself. (I mean "you" as in public health officials recently, not you specifically my fellow HN).
But what is a thinking person supposed to think when the Surgeon General is saying don’t wear masks in a pandemic caused by airborne viri?
In urban (educated) zones likely to be hotbeds for outbreaks, could the state not do a little nuance and say “hospitals need the N95s and you need a bandana”
Everybody has got a bandana, but if I were to start walking into stores with one before sanctioned, someone would be calling 911. In the meantime, how many weeks go by at R 3...
The WHO actually has a definition for this, when the droplets carrying the disease are <5μm they spread further and drift around for longer and that's when they start calling it airborne instead of droplets, COVID-19 is not in this category.
It's still good to wear a mask, I've lost count of the number of times over the years that some excited extrovert straight up spit in my face because they were worked up about something. lol.
https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/modes-of-t...
Recently I've read an interview with Drosten (the German virologist which came up with one of the Coronavirus tests) say that they're starting to see airborne transmission as an important transmission factor, maybe not a strong as droplets but comparable. This is especially the case in poorly ventilated spaces.
We already knew for instance that SARS is transmitted through aerosols. Then a new thing comes up which is related to the above and is basically named SARS-2 and we forget about the aerosols and instead think we should wash our hands a lot. Words can't express how stupid this is.
After looking closely I found a small move into the wrong direction (maybe caused by something else?!??)
I think it can change something: currently masks are seen as a necessary evil in stores and public transport. They could and should become ubiquitous.
With mask usage in Germany I see only negative trends in the growthrate of both case and death. I think to make them work something has to be changed.
There is a good chance that it now only works as a reverse placebo - it makes people feel confident and pushes them into more risky behaviour - most likely net negative.
No. Not in 2020. Not with the vast majority of the population. Nuance is dead.
There seems to be a trend to paint people as imbeciles who can't tie their own shoelaces without somebody standing over them, and then on investigation it turns out not to be true.
There was a story a while back about a couple who drank fish tank cleaner (containing chloroquine) after Trump touted chloroquine against the coronavirus. Come to find out the couple were not fans of Trump but were having marital difficulties, so now you've got to weigh the possibility that these two were stupid enough to drink poison against the possibility that the woman discovered a way to intentionally poison her husband and pin it on Trump:
https://nypost.com/2020/04/29/homicide-cops-investigate-deat...
More often than not, when you see someone doing something apparently colossally stupid, it's because you don't know the whole story rather than because they're actually that stupid. People understand nuance plenty when it's important to them.
> Mesa City police declined to comment on the investigation but told the paper that the probe was “normal protocol” for non-natural deaths and noted that the case has not been ruled a homicide “at this time.”
In left-leaning publications they omit "at this time" and make that the headline.
But the interesting thing about the story isn't the police determination. That hasn't been made yet, so it tells us nothing, and anyway the police would have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. The whole point is using that excuse creates a lot of reasonable doubt even if it was completely intentional.
The value of the story is that it gives us some new evidence. The narrative that somebody recklessly drank fish tank cleaner after a Trump recommendation loses credibility when you learn that the person was anti-Trump and thereby not inclined to unthinkingly believe whatever he says, up to and including drinking something with a label on it that says poison. Meanwhile a plausible alternative explanation exists.
I have much more faith in the KCDC for example and otherwise I want to see studies.
And anyway, people are unfairly accused of hoarding masks. It turns out that in the US, Australia, Germany (and probably other countries) China was buying up all the masks.
Regarding the masks, I went deepy down that rabbit hole in February and March. Most production happens in China. China didn't produce anything, needed what was there for themselves and had closed down a lot cities and ports and such. At the same time, demand increased by orders of magnitude around the world. hence the shortage. China didn't buy masks en mass from other countries, they didn't need to. A ,ot of fraud happened as soon as production resumed. No, people who, with a financial interest, tried to help sort out the shortage once the German government failed to do so, are sitting on tons of masks they bought in good faith for 5 - 10 times the normal price. Currently prces are down to roughly 2x the pre-Covid-19 prices. See the problem? People hoarding made the issue even worse.
Hordng mass during that period for retail sales or your own use, thus preventing PPE from getting to medical care professionals, is the deffinition of hoarding.
All of your mentioned institutions are publishing or using studies. Go look them up. But maybe accept that the people behind them know more about the subject than you do.
I don't know if China needed the masks, or if they needed to weld people in their apartments, but apparently they did that anyway. See for example the article "Billions of face masks sent to China during Australian bushfire crisis". This was happening around February.
Spiegel published an article in which a distributor of protection equipment got orders for months of inventory within a day from various Chinese customers. They also claimed that all the other distributors which they knew had a similar situation on their hands. In fact they got so many orders that they alerted the ministry of health about an upcoming bottleneck in procuring PPE.
Then there's the US: "U.S. exported millions in masks and ventilators ahead of the coronavirus crisis". $17.5 millions worth of masks exported during January and February.
And this is in addition to the hundreds of thousands in PPE they received as donations from all over the world.
The average Joe buying a 10 or 20 pack for himself & family is first of all not hoarding, as this is a very small quantity and secondly didn't cause the shortage.
The proble I have is, that now people accuse every institute or offical body of lying. Because they got, in people's minds, the mask thing wrong. Why can't we just accept that even experts can be wrong? Starting to accuse others of lying is the first step towards conspiracy theories, IMHO, as it only leaves black and white. And what is it that the WHO and co. have to be right 100% right from the start and everybody else is just asking questions?
It's mighty noble to donate to Italy after they confiscated all the inland mask production and bought tons of masks from everywhere else. And then they also pressured European politicians to prasise the communist party when receiving said donations.
Not every institute, just the WHO and to some limited extent a few others. Stop setting up this straw man, because that's clearly not the case for me and I listed some organizations which I do trust - because they've proven that they're competent.
Experts can be wrong, sure they can. But if their literal job is to protect us from such pandemic situations and they fuck up, they deserve some criticism.
If they persist in not recommending masks when already most countries are recommending them, like the WHO did until 1-2 weeks ago, they are uselessly incompetent and should be ignored.
It seems to me that the original misinformation on this subject has caused a continued belief that masks are not helpful in reducing transmission. Initial public health recommendations cannot easily be walked back. Once the meme is sufficiently embedded, it's nearly impossible to dislodge.