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Comment by natrik | Hacker News Reader

From another article linked in the one above:

"In late February, CDC director Robert Redfield testified before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee and was asked if healthy people should wear masks. “No,” Redfield responded. The day after that, US surgeon general Jerome Adams tweeted “Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS.” Fauci himself, in early March, told a Senate committee that the general public didn’t need to wear them because Covid-19 wasn’t widespread enough."[1]

Regardless of opinions on how to respond to Covid, mismanagement by various institutions and media has been agonizing to see. I'm strongly against government paternalism and believe the vast amount of misinformation peddled by institutions many hold faith in led to conspiracy on the rise.

[1] - https://www.wired.com/story/how-masks-went-from-dont-wear-to...

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Masks are an open question, there’s still very little actual reliable data on their effectiveness. I think the change in advice is based on two things. One is mask production is now high enough that there’s a decent supply for the public to access, without compromising supplies for medical personnel who definitely need them.

The other is plenty of countries in SE Asia with high rates of mask usage seem to have done well overall so it doesn’t seem to hurt. Anyway information changes do advice changes, that doesn’t mean these people are untrustworthy. Surely if they weren’t prepared to change advice as circumstances changed, that would be even more concerning. What matters is the reasons and context for the change.

What would the result have been if, in late February, the US government had said "Everyone should use a mask"?

How about just tell the truth. Masks work, but we have shortage of PPE for our frontline medical workers, so please do not buy PPE.

I think people can handle the truth. When you lie, you might temporarily achieve your objective, but you're sacrificing your ability to achieve any of your objectives in the future. Now I don't trust the WHO because of this, and I'll be less inclined to take them seriously.

> I think people can handle the truth.

I disagree. Look what happened when to toilet paper, which was less scarce and less important than PPE.

What if they'd invoked the defense production act to actually crank out enough of the things?

Or told everyone to make them, like the Czech republic did?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/04/04/czech-gove...

I see it as a tail wagging the dog scenario.

Government concerned about shortages + wasted N95 masks by untrained public -> recommendation against the public wearing masks -> additional evidence for airborne & asymptomatic transmission / opportunity to ramp mask production -> "I heard we recommended against the public wearing masks, so I guess we don't need to do that"

To be fair, there are tons of valid reasons not to allocate scarce masks to the general public (economic panic, inability to properly fit test, inability to properly wear, no decon procedures or facilities, likelihood of proximity to Covid-positive patient). But unfortunately, it seems like the actual rationale (and suggestions it would have for subsequent action) got lost in the simplification, even on the government itself.

the number of cases in Czech republic are going up, currently are higher then they have ever been ... so there

turns out it makes no difference how many you crank out, what you lock down and when

the examples that we should do this or that are pointless,

everyone will run the same fate as Sweden, lots of cases, the epidemic runs it course, then it is over

That's because the country loosened the restrictions. It worked, and should've been kept. Sadly the leadership here is populist too, which worked at first (the popular thing in Europe was to restrict) but then didn't (the popular thing became to open up). If they listened to our experts instead of being populists, we wouldn't have opened up and the cases would go to zero, as it nearly did a few months ago.

Source: am Czech.

They apparently had some outbreaks in mines. But they're otherwise doing reasonably well.

That’s wishful thinking. The US has and had the ability to mitigate covid19, but the Trump administration is incompetent, and our citizens have thrown up their collective hands in frustration, and have settled on the strategy of “what can ya’ do?”

Everyone would probably have started making masks, as happened in the countries without pre-existing mask cultures that did recommend them early. The medical supply wouldn't have changed much, since consumer retailers couldn't get them anyway at the height of the shortage.

Everyone now knows that the wearing of surgical masks by the general public is beneficial. That wasn't clear in late February and early March, and the scientific community was uncertain. That's why a paper finding that surgical masks are effective was important enough to be published in Nature Medicine as late as 3 April (and has been cited hundreds of times since).[1]

It might seem obvious that surgical masks help, but there are a few reasons that people thought they might not:

1. Surgical masks let lots of unfiltered air in.

2. People might feel a false sense of security with masks, which could make them harmful.

3. People might touch their faces more when wearing masks.

Research like the paper I mentioned above, as well as the realization that asymptomatic and presymptomatic people play a large role in spreading the virus convinced the scientific community that widespread wearing of surgical masks is helpful. But blaming institutions for not knowing the right answer early on seems very unfair to me.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2

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