Cloth masks do protect the wearer
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
And it bothers me that the quote, "dramatically less likely" is not a quote from the linked research, but seemingly just a pull quote of the article itself.
I support people wearing masks, even if it turned out to only be marginally better than not wearing one, but this article is borderline overreaching.
To say the least...
The article links to https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768396 to support, "Most infectious disease researchers and epidemiologists believe that the coronavirus is mostly spread by airborne droplets".
However, the linked study concludes, " All told, current understanding about SARS-CoV-2 transmission is still limited. There are no perfect experimental data proving or disproving droplet vs aerosol-based transmission of SARS-CoV-2."
In normal times, people spend a lot of time with other people in not-very-well-ventilated spaces - including, unfortunately, many conference-rooms, classrooms, small shops, bars/nightclubs, etc.
So in all those actual places, Covid-19 is aerosol-transmissible.
Also, in just the few weeks since that JAMA discussion, more actual examples of Covid-19 almost certainly transmitted by aerosols have been compiled; see for instance study/stories linked at:
I was not restating the conclusion, but showing how the original article was quoting support from a place that did not support what was being said.
> In a more recent report from a different cruise ship outbreak, all passengers were issued surgical masks and all staff provided N95 masks after the initial case of COVID-19 on the ship was detected. In this closed setting with masking, where 128 of 217 passengers and staff eventually tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 via RT-PCR, the majority of infected patients on the ship (81%) remained asymptomatic, compared with 18% in the cruise ship outbreak without masking.
> A report from a pediatric hemodialysis unit in Indiana, where all patients and staff were masked, demonstrated that staff rapidly developed antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 after exposure to a single symptomatic patient with COVID-19. In the setting of masking, however, none of the new infections was symptomatic. And in a recent outbreak in a seafood processing plant in Oregon where all workers were issued masks each day at work, the rate of asymptomatic infection among the 124 infected was 95%. An outbreak in a Tyson chicken plant in Arkansas with masking also showed a 95% asymptomatic rate of infection.
They obviously can’t repeat the experiment with COVID. They suspect the same thing happens but they aren’t sure.
Oh the off chance it really is true, I’m wearing a mask!
I've been astounded and dismayed by people's ability to reason themselves out of this obvious conclusion.
So passengers were already infected when that 81% figure was computed.
https://thorax.bmj.com/content/75/8/693
In a village in Tuscany, over 3000 people were actively tested and 50-75% were asymptomatic: https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m1165
And among NYC labor and delivery patients, 88 percent were asymptomatic: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/20/we-tested-...
This number is not at all unusual in the general population, regardless of mask wearing.
Now also, there are patterns observed in masked-vs-unmasked Covid-19-hotspots for which the idea "masks cut initial infectious dose enough to make infections milder or totally asymptomatic" fits really well.
You can watch Dr. Gandhi presenting on this topic with slides & multiple paper/incident references, during a UCSF 'Grand Rounds' a few weeks ago - here's a direct link to where her talk starts:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/153567601001500...
"The protective efficiencies were 33.3%, 11.3%, and 6.1% for the surgical, bandana, and dust masks, respectively. The N95 mask protective efficiency was 89.6%. In conclusion, the surgical mask protected the best of the three face masks tested. However, it is important to note that all three masks offer very little protection when compared to the N95, and wearing these face masks may produce a false sense of protection."
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577
> Conclusions This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks. This is an important finding to inform occupational health and safety. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection. Further research is needed to inform the widespread use of cloth masks globally. However, as a precautionary measure, cloth masks should not be recommended for HCWs, particularly in high-risk situations, and guidelines need to be updated.
Cloth masks aren't designed to protect the wearer, rather protect everyone else around them by catching droplets / reducing nasal spray / etc. It only works if everyone 95% of people are wearing one, especially indoors.
If this is the only RCT for cloth masks what kind of evidence is behind your claim? Do you have a source?
That is actually the headline from the article: "Cloth masks do protect the wearer – breathing in less coronavirus means you get less sick"
No one should be wearing cloth masks if surgical masks are available and no one should be wearing surgical masks when N95 or equiv masks are available. This cannot be repeated enough.
Masks clearly work, but not perfectly. Better masks work better. Wear one if you want to reduce your risk and risk to those around you.
We knew this prior to this pandemic.
Governments and doctors should stop being so paternalistic and just tell the truth.
We especially do not know whether cloth masks reduce personal risk.
None of the links given in this overly assertive article show that cloth masks work or that they reduce viral load.
All of these are plausible hypotheses and beliefs, but they are still not backed by high quality data.
http://web.archive.org/web/20200625094522/https://www.oralhe...
The article is called "Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review", published October 18, 2016.
This is the webpage as of early July 2020: https://www.oralhealthgroup.com/features/face-masks-dont-wor...
"If you are looking for “Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review” by John Hardie, BDS, MSc, PhD, FRCDC, it has been removed. The content was published in 2016 and is no longer relevant in our current climate."
"No longer relevant in our current climate."
This is an entirely separate question from: Do masks provide enough protection against disease transmission to be worth wearing/recommending in public places during a global pandemic, despite their imperfections? The answer to that, from many other studies, seems to be clearly yes. I can imagine that anti-mask folks started using this article as ammunition, due to the catchy headline ("see, this article says face masks don't work!"), and the publishers felt it was doing more harm than good and took it down for that reason.
Then the publishers should come out and say so by putting a tagline or disclaimer at the top of the article. Pulling the whole article to "supervise[] conduct and morals" [1] is textbook censorship.
A randomized trial with surgical masks during Covid-19 will be published soon. Here are some quotes and commentary:
> “All these countries recommending face masks haven’t made their decisions based on new studies,” Bundgaard said in an interview in Copenhagen.
> He says there’s evidence to suggest that the only effective face covering might be a visor, because the virus can spread through all mucous membranes, including via the eyes. He worries a cloth covering that only protects the nose and mouth provides a “false sense of security.”
> Bundgaard says the simple rules that currently exist in Denmark -- hand-washing, social distancing, self-isolating if you’re sick -- are effective because they’re easy to remember. He worries that using face masks might lead people to be “sloppy” in following the other guidelines.
> Bundgaard’s study on masks is due to be published next month. In the meantime, he says he hopes they don’t become mandatory in Denmark.
https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/face-mask-photo-op-adds...
Seems like an easy problem to deal with.
Unless you're being sarcastic (apologies if so, and no mean to offend if not), I take the opposite conclusion though, which seems borne out by reality. Public messaging and for social cohesion in service of the greater good is the hardest problem affecting any large-scale coordinated response, especially with propaganda, doublethink, and flat-out unwillingness to learn being so common. I gather that the article the previous commenter mentioned was removed so that such propagandists couldn't willingly misinterpret it to pass on to their sycophants.
The intro says "This trial investigates whether the use of face masks in the community will reduce wearers' risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection." (emph. mine) ie. if everyone wears masks, does my risk go down? This seems like the correct question to ask. But then the conclusion says "We will study whether a face mask protects the wearer of the mask against SARS-CoV-2 infection" which is a different question entirely!
If what we have been hearing over the past months is true (masks provide marginal protection for the wearer, but catch a significant portion of aerosol droplets & therefore protect society against the wearer) - I would expect the answer to the first question to be "yes" and the second to be "no"!
After-all there is probably a way to cherry-pick an argument that surgeon without a mask is more accurate therefore safer.
Wearing mask is not a big inconvenience, same as not dropping trash on the street. You just need a person that is not consumed by their self importance.
I swear there will soon be people claiming that not only sun revolves around the earth but it revolves around that single person.
This is also a good article on the subject. The revisionists claim that WHO and the CDC changed their mask recommendations based on new evidence but they never actually cite the studies which presumably were published just before the policy changes. I think that may have something to do with the fact that the recommendations were not evidence based.
However, it is important to note that seat belts from ropes, seat belts from cotton strings, and seat belts from elastic bands offer very little protection when compared to a properly tested and fitted seat belt, and wearing these seat belts may produce a false sense of protection (resulting in no avoidance of speeding or driving too closely to the person in front of you, the best general public guidance we currently have to avoid corporal damage from car crashes).
There are lots of reasons to believe wearing masks might be correlated with other mitigating behaviours (hand washing, going out less, etc), which would also reduce contact with the infected.
Also, I see no mention of studying possible side-effects of universal, permanent mask wearing, which makes this study irresponsible at the least.
> studying possible side-effects of universal, permanent mask wearing
Can you suggest a model which would imply there are likely to be any side-effects?
I'm also sortof baffled by the suggestion that there's anyone doing "permanent" mask wearing. I've been pretty fastidious about face coverings since early on but I don't think I've ever kept one on for more than 6 hours at a time, and it's hard to imagine anyone doing so outside of a long shift at work.
Vaccines are not all attenuated. Often they are killed. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inactivated_vaccine for more on that.
This is a (bad) philisophical question for people who do not understand the concept of "spectrum", not a scientific question.
Deciding where on the spectrum between non-life and life we declare something to be alive is endlessly debatable and non-actionable. The fact that in time technology will add more points on that spectrum does not change this fact.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation
The first real vaccine was to inoculate with cowpox instead, which was safe for humans but induced immunity to smallpox as well.
Modern methods are substantially safer, usually by entirely deactivating the virus before using it, but there are still some vaccines that use live virus (the oral polio vaccine is a live attenuated virus).
But yes, that is how vaccines work more or less. Though I believe the virus in the vaccine is either dead or incapacitated in some way.
So I'm wondering if this thing never goes away, the vaccine never works 100%, but in a year or so it's not much different from any flu in all age groups.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/COVID-19... from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_Unite...
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/
You see the same thing in New York, where fatalities per day has gone down from 1000 to 7, while cases per day is only down 90% from peak. Crowded cities it may be impossible to avoid exposure completely (which crazily may be a benefit!).
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/new-york/
Rural US is where the fatality rate isn't going down much, which would make sense since there's higher chance of someone having had zero exposure to the virus and then getting a bunch of it at once by coming in contact with a sick person.
NOTE this is not based on any research other than some guesses as to how these numbers could line up. Do not use this as a source for anything!
Antibodies disappear quickly so antibody studies aren't a perfect indicator of spread.
See for example:
> The UK study, meanwhile, suggested that antibodies could disappear completely within three months. The research tested more than 90 coronavirus patients for antibodies over 94 days. The results showed that three weeks after infection, just 60% of patients had developed a "potent" antibody response. In the weeks that followed, a mere 17% of those patients maintained that level of antibodies, The Guardian reported. In the other patients, antibody levels declined 23-fold or became undetectable within three months.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-antibodies-last-...
- more testing, as you said
- the most vulnerable people are already dead, and those who aren't are taking extra precautions
- currently, most new cases are from younger people, less vulnerable
- we are becoming better at treating it
Less viral load because of masks is just one other factor. There may be others, like weather or mutations.
- U.S. Surgeon General @Surgeon_General Feb 29 > Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
- U.S. Surgeon General, Mar 6 [Deleted Tweet] > Early am flight. No one with masks (they aren't recommended for general public) but noticed several people using antibacterial wipes on seats (I do this too). I'm not worried about #COVID19 - I'm worried about #flu & the guy reclining all the way back into me before takeoff. :/
"Surgeon general says administration "trying to correct" earlier guidance against wearing masks" July 12 > We're trying to correct that messaging, but it's very hard to do.
So what do we call this? Criminal negligence?
The World Health Organization played World Trade Organization and warned against banning flights from China. The U.S. General cared more about hardware stores not running out of masks, so medics could still get the masks that the government neglected to store or produce in case of a pandemic. The greatest U.S. authorities (including Azar and Fauci) did not trust the intelligence of the general public enough to promote mask usage, as they were afraid we were going to infect ourself by licking the front the mask when discarding it. "Better to just avoid sick people" they said, completely ignoring the impossibility of identifying sick people with asymptomatic spread or avoiding other people in busy cities. "Only wear a mask when you are sick" they said, condemning people who thought for themselves and read the research, and wore a mask to protect themselves and their caretakers, to the status of Leprosy sufferers.
> U.S. Surgeon General Feb 6 > Americans should be more concerned about the flu than coronavirus [...] As surgeon general, I’m telling folks the number one way to protect ourselves is to get a flu shot.
On Feb 6, if you lived in the United States, your likelihood of catching and dying from the flu was very possibly higher than COVID19. It's very possible the US Surgeon General wasn't saying to never worry; rather, that it was too early to worry at that time. I got a very bad flu-like illness in late January in Las Vegas. My assumption is that it was very likely the flu, based on estimated base rates of the diseases at that time.
> U.S. Surgeon General @Surgeon_General Feb 29 > Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
If masks have higher ROI for healthcare workers than average citizens, and there's a limited supply of masks, then telling average citizens to not buy masks makes perfect sense to me.
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
> U.S. Surgeon General, Mar 6 [Deleted Tweet] > Early am flight. No one with masks (they aren't recommended for general public) but noticed several people using antibacterial wipes on seats (I do this too). I'm not worried about #COVID19 - I'm worried about #flu & the guy reclining all the way back into me before takeoff.
Yeah, I cannot come up with any defense for these statements. These statements were clear mistakes by the US Surgeon General. I hope he regrets them and learns from them.
We call this "lying to manage supply", which is worse than negligence. The US Surgeon-General could have instead said something like "We need the best masks for healthcare workers because they are at the most risk, but we don't have enough right now. Here's how to sew your own cloth masks: $LINK. The general population is at lower risk, so please leave rated respirators for healthcare, where they can do the most good."
The Czech republic told its citizens to make masks for each other. That could have been a good move too.
Interesting to note that it is a discussion of models and general implications, but is not actually a study of itself.
For example, the seafood and chicken processing plants had a 95% asymptomatic rate among the infected.
I would love to see some studies which compared this against rates that are normally seen for the same age/gender/heath ect.
Similarly, how do these observations fit in to the greater picture. Are there other processing plants that used masks but had higher rates of symptoms?
Also, another way to view this data is that perhaps we are vastly underestimating total number of asymptomatic cases overall due to reporting and testing biases.
Think of it like this: I you get infected with 10 instead of 1.000.000 of a virus that grows x10 each day, your immune system has 5 extra days to fight it.
[Disclaimer: I'm a random software guy who reads a lot, not in any way a virus expert]
The hamster study did not show a big difference in outcome with higher viral load, contrary to what the article suggests.
If you trust in the science of viral load not mattering, you will pick randomly when given the choice of having 1 or 5 novel viral particles placed in your nasal cavity. Nobody sane trusts that.
Yes, viral load is correlated with higher severity for majority of flu-like illnesses, supported by research. Even if this coronavirus is somehow different, combating viral load is still beneficial for avoiding viral viral co-infection (getting COVID-19 with severe influenza on top).
I think their health is more relevant than habits in this case. I would guess that people who know they get sicker than most will be more cautious than average, they've been dealing with it their whole life. Maybe not totally independently of how their health habits are taught to them, but I bet a lot of it is just experience.
People know their bodies pretty well, even if they don't try very hard.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-07-21/masks-he...
Variolation is much safer than being exposed to smallpox in the normal way:
It is possible that you need a minimum viral load to elicit an immune response at all and if so, the virus would first need to replicate to that level in vivo.
There are certainly plausible mechanisms for the dose severity dependence hypothesis to be true, but with fast-replicating viruses I think the parsimonious assumption is transmission chains are dominated by a single event.
Does anyone know what the baseline to compare with is? What was the rate of symptoms in Diamond Princess?
I think it would be much better to let people "test it" for themselves. Let them be the scientists, ask them basic questions. You can do this with a kid:
1) Where is the virus in our body? (answer: in the lungs)
2) What does it feel like to wear a mask? (answer: hot/stuffy)
3) Why does it feel hot/stuffy? (answer: the mask is keeping your exhalation closer to you)
4) If masks block your breath, and your breath has the virus, does that not then mean that masks block the virus? (answer: yes)
Bonus) Suppose masks don't actually block the virus that well, say by only 10%. Will they still affect the chain of transmission (yes, its "multiplicative": 90-> 81%->72%->...)
This "psuedo-experiment" would not be up to snuff for a journal, but conversations are not publications. Its better to make assumptions and make deductive arguments, because then you don't need to rely on trust in scientific institutions.
IMO, the higher quality media outlets have done a pretty good job in a field full of disinformation and propaganda.
Unfortunately, low information citizens are attracted to increasingly fringe sources. My brother owns a marina, and they are struggling with customers and staff who refuse to follow protocols and cite fairly crazy sources to refute things.
1) The virus is not only in the lungs, but it is not important here, pass. Maybe insist on the fact it can be in the nose, to encourage people to put their mask on their nose.
2) Good observation
3) That the wrong part. Hot means that heat is trapped, but air definitely isn't, you wouldn't be able to breathe otherwise. That you can't breathe with masks is a common argument used by anti-maskers, and many times shown wrong. Masks can keep your breath closer to you in the sense that you don't project it as far because it makes it slower and more diffuse. It also has a chance to trap droplets containing the virus.
4) masks don't block your breath in fact surgical masks are more effective and more breathable than cotton masks. That's because surgical masks are optimized to stop viruses and let air through.
1) It’s not just in our lungs, but in our entire “breathing system”. Still need to control the breath.
2) Masks don’t block oxygen, but they block the wet part of the breath at least somewhat. The wet part is the dangerous part.
You could go back and forth with a so-called “anti-masker” and you’d prob be leagues ahead of where you’d be if you shared a masks article.
Here's a simple argument: death rates from COVID are about the same as a regular flu season in places that didn't do dumb things like close hospitals and send sick people into care homes. In many places they're around the level of flu.
But flu is always around. If we don't wear masks all the time, then why do we need to wear them now?
There is no logical answer to this except "you should wear masks permanently" which many people will never accept, as the benefits are simply too low to justify the consequent problems.
So my point stands. If you're going to make simple pro-mask arguments, be prepared for equally simple counterarguments. Excess death data says 2020 is for most countries an unremarkable basically normal year. Even in the few where it's not, it's still comparable to prior years when nobody noticed anything at the time, so hardly abnormal.
"Long COVID" may be the usual problem of slow recovery from viral infection that occasionally happens, or it may hardly be real given the broad array of vague symptoms that are now allowed to characterise the disease. Everything from a runny nose to a headache to full blown pneumonia is classifiable as COVID these days. That means many people with other issues will end up with spurious correlations of the form, "I had COVID symptoms and now I am fatigued" when the cause may not be "COVID". The apparent lack of consistency in these reports, the wildly varying time between infection and onset, etc, all suggests there's a lot of noise in these reports. Definitely not a part of any simple argument for mask wearing.
I don't know why that was even in serious question unless the only transmission method was putting your fingers in your mouth or something. Of course more filtering will be better.
The arguments against wearing a mask have always been weak, the arguments for wearing a mask didn't start so strong but were well established in March/April. Anyone arguing against them after that point was either parroting stuff they heard without understanding, or was making disingenuous arguments that have contributed to a lot of misery and death for no benefit.
I don't think I heard anyone with actual medical training suggest that wearing a mask might be worse than nothing -- except for one scenario, that it might cause a false sense of security. Never once have I heard another reason from someone with actual medical training for why masks might make things worse, at least when it comes to COVID.
Especially when there are many others who are non-compliant - otherwise you get "why should I protect you when you refuse to protect me".
Unless you're going to argue that nobody should ever be in a room without permanently wearing and disposing of a constant streams of masks ever again (not gonna happen), you're going to get the virus at some point. Therefore, as hospital overload never happened there's no real point to any of this.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147789392...
Laws != compliance with laws.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/27/more-americ...
Do you think speed limits have >85% compliance?
- Compliance with and enforcement of the mandate is low.
- There could have been even more deaths without the mask mandate.
- People might be more negligent with social distancing when they think masks will protect them; e.g. I can go to that keg party with 200 people as long as everyone is wearing a mask. (as happened with seatbelts)
- Concurrent opening up has led to more cases anyways.
https://m.twitch.tv/videos/725630253 (skip to 4:49:00)
Where are the masks? Why is the crowd so dense?
Clearly nobody cares over there: the venue doesn't care, the attendees do not care, the authorities do not care.
It is a matter of time until those events cause a coronavirus outbreak.
I didn't know that was ethical.
The paper that the headline is based on does not really support the headline.
Other links are not specific to COVID.
If evidence based medicine isn't an advantage then it's down to luck?
The best is remedies that have both. But don't think evidence without good theory is fine. I'm not sure it's even that much better than theory without good evidence.
That's the reason we need randomized trials. How do masks work outside of the lab?
Also, it isn't accepted science that Covid-19 infects through aerosols.
There is only one study that looked at cloth masks and it was completed in 2015.
> And IMO it's completely wrong to say we have no evidence tht masks work.
I never said that. I'm saying that a high standard of evidence has not been met and there isn't much interest in running trials on cloth masks. The only one I could find is in Guinea-Bissau.
Anti-maskers are killing their parents, not themselves.
So - no. Mask wearers aren't going to experience any difference in death rates in the vast majority of places because COVID deaths have already ended. And of course, when they were occurring, there was a lot of bad reporting there which conflated people who were dying anyway with people unexpectedly killed by the virus.
It takes years to train a populous to wear masks. Asia didn't just turn it on.
So were is the reckoning to the medial experts who fought this all the way, who told us to just wash our hands with soap.
These same people chose our complex cancer treatments, yet after 100 years of disease control, masks are a medical argument in the West still.
1. Masks don't work! -> Nope, they do.
2. You need training to make masks work! -> Nope, you don't.
3. If you don't wear your mask perfectly, you're going to get the disease. The outcome is binary. -> Doesn't look that way.
There are a few still in line to be determined, supposedly:
* This disease is novel in ways that no other disease is. So a large percentage of those who get it will experience life-long adverse effects causing substantial loss of QALYs. -> I don't think so, but we'll see. Sure, a few people here and there will have life-long breathing issues but nearly everyone will have practically identical QoL as they did before.
* Single group activities are the biggest determiners of whether there will be an increase in cases in America. -> I don't think so. I think it'll be whether we have large scale openings. i.e. protests are not as big a deal as letting people go to restaurants (the latter will dwarf the former)
* Outdoor activities are spreading the disease at a substantial rate in America. -> I don't think so. It's not the beach-goers. It's the guys mostly indoors.
We'll see. Ultimately, thinking in Bayesian terms, this virus is less likely to be novel in multiple ways than it is likely to be novel in one way. So far, that looks to have been a good assumption. Let's see what else it holds up on. There was always a lot of "We don't know enough. This could be the end of civilization" going around and I think we always knew enough. We did and we continue to.
https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-causes-heart-damage-hea...
https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/27/covid19-concerns-about-l...
News has a motivation to sensationalize, i.e. only time will tell if this was a lot of panic over nothing or if 20% of the people who caught COVID will drop dead over the next 10 years.
> 1. Masks don't work! -> Nope, they do.
I thought that originally the WHO said that masks are not proven to work, not that they don't work at all. Now masks are proven to work.
> 2. You need training to make masks work! -> Nope, you don't.
> 3. If you don't wear your mask perfectly, you're going to get the disease. The outcome is binary. -> Doesn't look that way.
I don't remember these guidances from the WHO or CDC. Can you provide a source?
https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...
I will quote it here:
> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
And of course, Fauci told everyone not to wear masks. But that doesn't matter. This is the Surgeon General saying "They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching Coronavirus". That is a categorical statement.
My theory is that when people think that the guidance has radically shifted throughout the COVID-19 epidemic, it's because they are getting their information from non-authoritative sources. But like your example, sometimes the "authoritative sources" are super wrong.
Dr Fauci did eventually admit that the guidance on masks was not optimal:
> "We have to admit it, that that mixed message in the beginning, even though it was well meant to allow masks to be available for health workers, that was detrimental in getting the message across," Fauci said in an interview with Mary Louise Kelly of NPR's All Things Considered. "No doubt about it."
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/01/8862991...
What about your points 2 and 3?
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22777170 (claims that training is required or you're going to get rekt, read thread)
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22776396 (while doesn't claim a no-threshold model, the threshold is a hundred viral particles)
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22735235
3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22734656
4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22734923
5: https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/status/1243171683067777024?s=20 (the WHO saying not to wear a mask, by the way)
6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22530340
7: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22610180
8: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22595955
9: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22559272
If you are just looking for random people on the Internet being wrong, then yes, there are lots of examples of that!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI
That is Dr Fauci himself on 60 minutes in early March saying that Americans should not be wearing masks. I guess he changed his mind. People want to say, "Yes he changed his mind due to new evidence." Ok what evidence? I want to see it. And it better be from just before they changed their views and not after they changed their views.
The N95 masks weren't, and aren't, in the sense he meant. People have said over and over, the way the masks we're wearing now are effective is in protecting others from us, should we be infected.
I used to accept that the "party line" changed, but now I think it's just a misunderstanding.
There also was a very robust debate at the time about whether masks worked or not, and which types of masks worked, hence why lots of researchers immediately started to study these issues.
I'm not saying there wasn't incorrect information out there, but it wasn't nearly as binary as you are making it out to be.
https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...
I'll quote it for you: (but read it in its entirety if you want the whole thing, it's only one Tweet)
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus...
There is no nuance in that statement (I did not capitalize the 'NOT'. It comes capitalized already).
I would add to your list that contact-based transmission, in contrast the the obsession over surface sanitizing procedures, is not a meaningful transmission risk. Derek Thompson called it "hygiene theater", similar to the post-9/11 security theater.
It is a novel disease, but it is close to SARS-CoV-1 from the 2003 outbreak. There is a lot of long-term research on the quality of life indicators. One paper listed 20% of hospitalized with full disability due to chronic fatigue syndrome 5 years after hospitalization.
Young people with viral pneumonia and mechanical ventilation still walked slower than 60+ seniors (very little restoration of lung capacity).
> a large percentage of those who get it will experience life-long adverse effects
Mental health also influences QOLI. From SARS, MERS, HIV, and other severe viral infections, we know that this can have severe impact on mental health (many from SARS-CoV-1 and MERS suffer from PTSD and depression if not degenerative bone necrosis == constant muscle pain).
People report trouble smelling or speaking months after COVID. There are support groups popping up for people with persistent problems, chronic fatigue and sleep problems being one that seems to linger for months.
Early research from Italy:
> Patients were assessed a mean of 60.3 (SD, 13.6) days after onset of the first COVID-19 symptom; at the time of the evaluation, only 18 (12.6%) were completely free of any COVID-19–related symptom, while 32% had 1 or 2 symptoms and 55% had 3 or more. None of the patients had fever or any signs or symptoms of acute illness. Worsened quality of life was observed among 44.1% of patients. [...] a high proportion of individuals still reported fatigue (53.1%), dyspnea (43.4%), joint pain, (27.3%) and chest pain (21.7%).