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Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

It's not clownish, just the opposite.

There was a severe shortage of N95's at the time, and if the public thought masks were important, there would have been an unprecedented run on PPE and the medical community would have had squat. Given that masks, particularly N95s are actually effective in a Healthcare environment ... it was the exactly the right call to make.

Get the masks to those who it will actually help, not the public for whom it will make a smaller difference.

Once production is ramped, or we have enough PPE, then it makes sense to have a pro-mask policy for the public.

From a communications perspective, it's obviously problematic, but in terms of equipment triage, it's highly rational and we actually want our leaders making these kinds of tough decisions.

The WHO and various governments should have been more efficient in their messaging however.

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"There was a severe shortage of N95's at the time, and if the public thought masks were important, there would have been an unprecedented run on PPE and the medical community would have had squat."

Uh, you what actually happened? There was been an unprecedented run on PPE and the medical community got squat. It's bizarre to have to recite headline news from two months ago ... doctors in NYC using garbage bags instead of real protection. Hand sanitizer unavailable. Nurses in hospital prohibited from using their own masks and not getting them from the hospitals. The Federal government hoarding PPEs for who knows what asinine reason.

Well I think you helped to prove my point.

As I said, there was excess demand for PPE, but by and large, most medical staff did have access.

That there were some doctors who were unable, means that obviously there was some shortage.

But Dr. Fauci and the WHO had of indicated that 'every American should wear a mask' - then all doctors would have been wearing garbage bags through the entire affair.

The 'excess demand' from natural concern was bad enough, but 350 Million Americans clamouring for N95's would have wiped out any hope of keeping the medical staff in place.

It was a rational decision given the risks and unknowns: We need to get PPE to doctors because the value to the general public is limited.

A tough and difficult decision at the time, but they did the right thing.

> if the public thought masks were important, there would have been an unprecedented run on PPE and the medical community would have had squat

This still happened, though. All the stores that sold masks to consumers sold out, very rapidly, at the same time the Surgeon General was tweeting that they didn't work.

They should've ordered they be pulled from sale, not lied about their efficacy.

This is also incidentally the exact sort of thing the Defense Production Act is actually for. It could be invoked, used to give guaranteed quantity and price contracts to suppliers and avert the entire issue of supply runs.

Which likely wouldn't happen because it's not like someone who gets a profitable contract from the Federal government, retools their factory, isn't going to then try and squeeze as much production out of that as they can anyway.

> it was the exactly the right call to make.

Lying is never a defensible policy. If there was reasonable concern about run on PPE, then perhaps government order restricting or banning their sale to general population (like it was done by some governments) should be considered.

Lying is absolutely a defensible strategy when done for the greater good.

That doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been a ton of clowny behavior from leadership.

It destroys public trust. What do you now say to people who refuse to wear masks? Do you say "I was lying to you earlier for the greater good, but now I'm not." Why should they ever listen to you again? You could be lying again.

This is exactly what was done here in Czech Republic - sale of high grade PPE to public was banned, massive PPE shipments ordered and home made masks made mandatory everywhere.

This seems to have been effective, as most of the restrictions have been lifted and we are back to sporadic local clusters by now.

Yeah this is the part of the issue that my social media feed seems to attach to. They post comments from politicians and public figures (and medial professionals) saying early on that we shouldn't wear masks.

I'm sad that the original messages didn't come across as the nuanced issue that it is. Hospitals need the N95 stuff because they are exposed at high rates for a long time. Hospitals also educate their staff on proper protocol when wearing a mask so that people don't negate the effectiveness by wearing it wrong or touching their face after removing it.

The public isn't educated on proper mask wearing procedure. We don't know how to test that a mask fits properly. We don't have the same training to avoid cross contamination and poor mask hygiene. We don't understand the marginal benefits of masks and how it creates a false sense of security causing us to take more risks and spread the disease more quickly.

So at first, it makes perfect sense to funnel the best masks to the highest risk people and encourage "stay at home" (instead of "go outside with a mask") because it limits disease spread the most and protects the community.

I'm sad that it has turned in to "but they said masks did nothing" as an excuse to not wear them. It was never that they did nothing, it's that masks ALONE is not enough. Masks and proper behavior are necessary together.

> I'm sad that it has turned in to "but they said masks did nothing" as an excuse to not wear them. It was never that they did nothing, it's that masks ALONE is not enough. Masks and proper behavior are necessary together.

If you have the correct behaviour (hand washing, distancing) the mask provides you no benefit.

The only point to wearing a mask is if you are unable to maintain that distance, or you're stuck in a room with symptomatic people. But if you're doing that you're also provided with eye protection and gloves and a gown and copious water for handwashing, and you've probably been trained to don and doff the PPE correctly, and maybe you even have a person acting as a PPE spotter helping you put it on or take it off correctly.

No one is telling people to wear masks in their own house or sparse outdoor spaces, and in most cases there are no rules about outdoor spaces at all. Where the anti-maskers are causing a problem is refusing to wear masks indoors. Airflow can be very different in different buildings and the "6 feet apart" distancing rule is fairly arbitrary. It is implausible to actually properly distance in most indoor spaces. Hence masks are indeed important, even for those following the other "rules".

That aside, there is high overlap these days between people that say masks don't work and people that are completely negligent about distancing. It is a little ironic, as there were concerns that belief in masks would make people distance less due to sense of security.

I don't recall the exact CDC statement but I do recall quite a few of my (well educated, liberal, in some cases educated in public health) friends posting on Facebook that masks actually do more harm than good because "people touch their face more" or something. I remember thinking a lot of the messaging seemed wrong, but I also wasn't confident enough about it to start getting into social media fights about whether people should wear masks.

So there definitely was some narrative going around back in March that masks had an actively negative effect for an individual, not just that masks do nothing. That said, anyone who is an anti-masker at this point is being ridiculous.

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