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> You could be truthful and say "While masks are effective, please dont horde them as they are needed by the hospitals".

I’m not a politician nor I defend most of them in general but do you expect that people would not hoard them when everyone was (back then) panicking at a new extreme deadly virus?

So the easiest solution (not necessarily the best) was to do politics which is to deceive. If a country says that the masks are very effective yet only selected people will get them, even if it makes sense factually speaking, riots will ensue because that’s how masses work (in most big countries anyway). If you deceive, you gain time and everyone will eventually get their own masks, which is how it played out.

Hopefully I don’t get shunned by this. I’m just trying to illustrate that plain transparency at extreme situations may just not be an easy option as you put it.

Edit: wording

When you are an institution like the CDC you need to be trusted to be effective. So, yes, the most expedient solution to the mask problem is to lie, but it's not worth the long term damage to credibility when they are inevitably caught in that lie.

It’s a pick your poison situation. Reputation may have been damaged (who knows really, masses seem to forget rather quickly nowadays) but the alternative might just have caused a lot more trouble.

No, when you're the CDC, you disseminate the facts as they are known at the time. You don't lie to supposedly keep masks from being hoarded. Considering that's exactly what happened, I fail to see how it could have turned out much worse.

Just take a look at Fauci as an individual. He's never said masks don't work. He did say "there's no reason to be walking around with a mask," back in March, but, back in March, that was likely true. And, it's not like he hasn't reversed himself when new data comes in. That's precisely why he still has credibility: because what he says is always in line with the best available data.

I can’t talk specifics about CDC as I’m european but this way of acting was present in most of the countries around the world and I think it’s somewhat safe to think that it decreased masks demand to a certain point (1%? 20%? 30%?). Even in solid democracies with high trust like Finland they lied so that people wouldn’t hoard that much.

Also I IMHO doubt that Fauci didn’t know about mask effectiveness - sure, maybe he didn’t know the very specifics but it was kind of obvious back then it wasn’t going to harm and one could infer that it’d probably help somewhat (nowadays it’s clear). IMHO all authorities just agreed to transmit a similar message around the world so they could in the meantime arrange more mask orders and sort out the distribution as production speeded up while avoiding massive riots and/or poor masks made at home that could’ve been worse than nothing.

He didn't say they weren't effective. He said it wasn't worthwhile to be walking around wearing one at that time. The virus wasn't anywhere near as prevalent then as it is now, and, people had no real sense of how quickly this thing could spread.

People were going to hoard masks no matter what. Lying to them doesn't help, but it definitely reduces trust.

This is true.

A competent administration would have bought up enough of (or all of) the PPE inventory as soon as they understood what was coming. At that point, there would have been no need to lie, because there would have been nothing left for the public to hoard.

I'm not blaming the CDC, or the SG. I'm blaming the political decision makers above them

We can’t know for sure but I bet many people didn’t hoard or didn’t even bother to buy any in the beginning because of this announcement. At big scale (e.g. USA) this means millions of saved masks.

And I agree with your last point of course.

> At big scale (e.g. USA) this means millions of saved masks.

At what cost? How many people have died because mask wearing was discouraged during the early part of the pandemic? We will probably never know, but I would not be surprised if that advice caused a lot of deaths by allowing the virus to spread more easily.

The many public figures dismissing masks after things really got going in July killed more people than the communication mistakes in February. Then they kept dismissing them in August and September and October and November and December, and many are still doing it now.

Face coverings were ordered in many states starting in April.

The benefit was to save masks so health workers would get them (at least most of them) and the goal was more or less met. Cost? Probably too high. Alternatives?

Again I don’t defend these actions, I’m just trying to reason why they decided to go that way and not the most instintive one “let’s be fully transparent” (at least for HN anyway).

Ideally, they could decree companies to prioritize shipments to hospitals and health workers and set-up a task force to route all purchase decisions through the govt. until mask shortage is solved.

> So the easiest solution was to do politics which is to deceive

I disagree. politics is not to deceive. Politics is to guide and educate. The longer we accept the rationale that politics is inherently an immoral game, the more our minds accept the status quo.

Those politicians who lied must be held accountable. Those who pushed for the truth but took actions to prioritize health workers should be rewarded.

Yeah there are better solutions but they’re not the easiest nor the fastest. Lying ticked those boxes and so they did it that way in many places.

Politics is IMHO all or a majority about deception unfortunately and once you accept this these actions just make more sense and you stop playing their silly game. I decided to move to a smaller and more healthy democracy because I knew degeneration of politics back in my (somewhat big) country was only going to get much worse and in some cases that can mean literal death to me and I could do nothing to change it. Well, all this is way too off-topic so let’s leave it for another time as it’s an interesting one :)

I can see this being a point but there was no place to debate this sort of a thing. I would never downvote you.

> We need better mechanisms to express disagrements than the status quo without being belittled, insulted, shunned, disrespected and ousted

We do have such mechanisms. In the olden days, opinions were expressed through slow moving mediums such as news papers and press conferences. Those who wanted to criticize them had channels such as letters to newspaper editors, radio calls, etc, to express disagreement or point out flaws. This was good and bad. Good because you had to invest a finite amount of time and resources to express counter opinion. Bad because it has the effect of amplifying the voices of fanatics.

However, with today's friction free methods to express opinion and social media echo chambers that amplify everything, there is just too much noise.

I just hate Twitter and Facebook. Their ultimate contribution to society is sum negative.

You're absolutely spot on. We need to come up with better etiquettes for debates of difficult situations on the internet than this Twitter/FB nonsense and in a more formal forum. There should be rules of engagement with freedom to express disagreements backed by logic, reasoning and data.

That's cool ... just ignore twitter/FB. Do you realize yc is kinda social media too?

And we're expressing opinions without people being too belittled/shunned ...

Do I need to comment on the irony of a killed/flagged comment replying to yours stating that unpopular opinions are killed or flagged here immediately?

Cue someone replying that they only flagged and downvoted it because it was lol so ironic.

AFAICT at the beginning of the pandemic, we were very much in "not proven" territory with masks. There was a lively debate ablut whether they provided much protection (and there still is, we mostly wear them to protect others from us, not for ourselves, again AFAICT).

Is it possible they were just wrong?

That's my memory too - at least in terms of public messaging, there was a lot of "wash your hands for 20 seconds" and "it takes two weeks for the virus to die on surfaces" and so forth, which is largely irrelevant given what we know now about transmission. We also had a significant shortage of hand sanitizer and soap, and e.g. New York's slave laborers were put to work making hand sanitizer, but there was no "hand sanitizer doesn't work" PSA, even though hospitals needed it badly too.

The fact that they said untruthful information about masks was awful, and it certainly deserves a proper postmortem-in-the-court-of-public-opinion, but I don't think it was deliberate lying.

> That's my memory too - at least in terms of public messaging, there was a lot of "wash your hands for 20 seconds" and "it takes two weeks for the virus to die on surfaces" and so forth, which is largely irrelevant given what we know now about transmission.

It's not so much now but that actual infectious disease specialists aren't being completely drowned out by people who should have known to keep their mouth shut. Seriously John Cochrane has an excuse, he's from the grifter school of economics and a dummy. Doctors, biologists, etc without specific training in infectious disease should have known better.

> I don't think it was deliberate lying.

At the onset, hospitals needed PPE, which includes masks. I remember there being messaging encouraging ordinary citizens not to stockpile N95 masks because hospitals needed the supply instead. If anybody in this same camp was telling the public that N95 masks aren’t effective then that’s an obvious contradiction, a lie.

Anyway, lies and inconsistent messaging both degrade trust, which is a big problem at this moment.

Not really, the CDC tweet said that they are ineffective at preventing covid in the general public but necessary for health workers in literally the same sentence:

"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!"

There was, as far as I can tell, little evidence at the time that the general public wearing them was effective at stopping transmission, and there were worries that poorly fitted masks and poor mask discipline could actually make things worse.

There are logical ways in which it can be true that they are useful for health workers but not for the public.

We know they aren't correct now, of course, as there is now evidence.

That's not what the tweet said though. It said that they are not effective, with a capitalised "NOT". It's as clear as day that they were deliberately misleading the public.

The fact that hospital workers were desperate for masks, to the extent that they were making their own out of household materials when they couldn't get real ones, tells you all you need to know.

Anyone with a brain cell in their head could see that the government's messaging on masks made no sense. This reduced public trust in the government's other public health announcements.

Masks can ONLY help. They're not going to make it more likely to catch COVID even if there was no proven effectiveness. Basic logic and years of masks development (used in hospitals for over 100 years) should tell us that they do something. They're not useless.

Depends on the material - fleece actually can increase transmission.

And potentially poor mask handling and discipline could have made transmission worse. We more or less know this isn't the case now, but didn't then.

So yes, it actually could make things worse.

This was never expressed by the authorities, they should explain. It is a pretty iffy claim and with such a claim, you gotta have some data that invalidates decades of mask usage in hospitals.

Hospitals don't use fleece.

Saying that the material has an enormous impact on effectiveness doesn't invalidate anything. I mean, that's why N95 masks are so complicated and different from surgical masks, because material matters so much.

If they were ineffective but people thought they were effective they'd act like they were effective and go do things that would get them infected, falsely believing the mask would protect them.

They appear to have turned out to be effective (FYI: I've warn masks every time I've been outside since 2020/3/16 so I'm certainly on the side of masks)

Will you downvote this because it shows a logical flaw, not a judgement, but it you probably disagree with it?

The status quo was no mask recommendation. I have no idea why this change of policy is spurring so much feelings.

"Not proven" in the same sense that parachutes are not proven to protect people jumping out of planes, in that it's pretty obvious that they do but no one's done a double blind study.

As it happens, people have since done studies. (Not double blind, though)

Surgical masks weren't in "not proven" territory at any point. Okay there might be some error bars left, but they are generally considered helpful. To the best of my knowledge no government has even attempted to deny this (which would be silly since half the airtime was people in surgical masks running around in Covid wards). These however were in limited supply.

The effectiveness of other masks was not so much "not proven" but to the extent that the lack of any standard allows you to say anything about them they just aren't anywhere near as good. In my mind their effectiveness in combating the pandemic is still well within 'not-proven' territory, but since this is somehow a partisan issue in the U.S. I'll limit myself to just saying that they shouldn't be considered a replacement for social distancing.

> Surgical masks weren't in "not proven" territory at any point.

Sure they were. At some points we weren't even sure if n95 masks did much.

Surgical and N95 masks were proven against other coronaviruses.

Right... just as N95 masks were proven against other non-coronaviruses.

Of course n95 masks only prevent entry through the mouth and nose, and particularly at the time we had reason to think those were other points of entry. So, saying that they were "proven" to work against SARS-CoV-2 at the time was simply false.

There's any number of terrible things about the US response that could/should have been better. But the US Surgeon General did not lie to the public with that tweet. His communication wasn't adequate for someone holding his office, because it takes effort to parse, and crucial communications like his need to be better, but he didn't lie. Look carefully at what he said:

"if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"

This is a statement of confidence in the masks he's talking about, N95/adjacent PPE. Saying they provide any substantial margin of personal protective safety for healthcare providers is saying they work.

Now some people read "STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective" and stopped thinking right there. Some of the fault lies in anyone who did that. Some of the fault lies with the SG for poor communication. But the fact is, the SG's statement did not stop there.

It continues into a statement skeptical not of the effectiveness of PPE masks as a personally protective measure, but as a measure that can protect the general public. There might by any number of reasons for that. He might believe the general public can't wear them effectively and conscientiously (I didn't believe that in March, but after watching people wear cloth masks, I absolutely do). He might believe there just weren't enough to protect the public (absolutely true then). He might believe they might engender a false sense of confidence preventing more effective measures (credible). Some of those reasons were actually stated and yet not perceived, which speaks to the trouble of "just telling the truth." There may have been others.

Additionally, I'm astonished that many people continue to read his statement and fail to distinguish between PPE masks and cloth masks primarily about preventing source transmission (ie, wearer infecting others, with some fractional protection from being infected by others). In fact, I'm astonished at how many people still don't understand what cloth masks can do and talk about themselves or those wearing them in terms of protecting themselves.

It's unfortunate that he didn't communicate better. Failing on that front might even be reason enough to have someone else doing that job.

But honestly 10 months out I don't know that it's all on him.

Hoarding masks would have been the sort of response that the author is railing against (a hoarded mask isn't doing anything to get R down), except that, being a free-market response, it would not have served the author's purpose as a parable extolling the wisdom of markets.

Asking people not to hoard masks would have been no more effective than it was for toilet paper - I would guess less effective, in fact.

Agree. No one remembers that conservatives were also trying desperately to locate masks for purchase back in March.

The public is smarter than the technocrats give them credit for, and will bristle at attempts to influence their behavior through lying - or even just fibbing, as in this case.

Good luck gaining back their trust after a round or two of that. In that respect, they may resemble petulant children - but can you blame them?

Huh?

This is capitalism.

If masks are in short supply and hospitals needs them - we obviously buy them all up and sell to those in need for an exuberant markup

What do you think the US is, buddy

The sensible approach when masks are in short supply is to direct more money to the mask manufacturers. It is overwhelmingly likely that they will use the money to produce more masks.

How are the mask manufacturers going to get more money if they can't charge an exorbitant markup? They need to buy new plant/ materials and hire new people. Is the plan that the mask manufacturers have to go deeply in to debt to create enough masks? That is the best I can think of without sharp price rises, and it is a terrible plan for encouraging people to produce more masks.

This worked exactly how it was supposed to in Japan.

Masks went up in price in April because supply was limited, by late May they were at clearance prices as supply out stripped demand.

What's your threshold for "exorbitant"? If you add an extra dollar to the price, that's enough to get a lot of expansion of manufacturing. Beyond that, I would say that long-term purchasing contracts, or government funding to pay for new machinery, are both much better options to boost capacity than huge price hikes.

> What's your threshold for "exorbitant"?

I don't have one, or actually care about specific numbers. There is some magic price where I'll start learning how to make masks but I doubt we're going to see that reached in my lifetime.

> If you add an extra dollar to the price, that's enough to get a lot of expansion of manufacturing.

In 18-24 months, sure. We're 12 months in so far though. If they need the money now it is a different story. The higher the price, the more immediate and desperate actions become justified to increase supply. That is one of the core parts of market economics. Let the price rise to some silly amount and people will move heaven and earth to increase supply.

To get extraordinary things done an extraordinary amount of money will be needed. That can come from extraordinary prices. Or it can not happen and shortages can persist longer than required.

> They lied to the public about how ineffective masks are to make sure there is enough stock for healthcare workers.

Except they didn't. What they said that the odds of you getting infected were not substantially changed by you wearing a mask in general, but they were substantially changed for people in high risk situations, like healthcare workers.

That became less and less true as more and more people became infected, so the basal chances of you getting exposed, and therefore the impact of wearing a mask, changed.

> "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! http://bit.ly/37Ay6Cm"

^ US Surgeon General official tweet which was then deleted. Source, Google cached version, google "US Surgeon General tweet masks".

I'm not sure where you're trying to link, but your bitly takes me to a cdc page, not to that tweet, which basically makes me discard your argument

These are not my words, including the bitly link. This is verbatim tweet from the US Surgeon General.

I added quote marks to clarify this. The original tweet has been deleted. The bitly link was part of the original tweet.

See, this is the joy of PR BS. Context gets changed to mislead people, and the wrong people get blamed.

...and I see that my original comment was down voted as a consequence. What's real doesn't matter as compared to what is believed.

Where did you see that? What I remember seeing from the WHO and CDC was that wearing a mask wouldn't prevent you from catching the disease, period.

It won't prevent you from getting the disease.

It will lower risk, particularly of you giving the disease to other people.

Useless pedantry, and wrong, to boot. Given a low enough baseline exposure to the virus, which would otherwise cause disease, it certainly is possible that wearing a medical grade mask could lower one's exposure sufficiently to not get the disease. One may still be exposed to the virus, but, given the reduced viral load, one may not experience symptoms.

Not useless pedantry, particularly given the context and what was observed to have happened. These are technical terms and they have specific meanings, and the context was provided in the communications.

There was a genuine concern that people would not only consume the supply of mask product, but also that they'd think they were safe because they had a mask on, and then proceed to ignore other safety guidelines, thinking they were safe.

This in fact happens every day right now, but you know... it's just pedantry.

Again, if you look at the CDC statements, they are consistent with this. They said it could reduce the risk of spreading or contracting the disease (and the specifics of how that might work were not as well understood at the time), but that it would NOT prevent either of those scenarios.

If you think about it, communicating that "they don't work at all" but "we have to keep a stockpile of them for the people at highest risk" doesn't make any sense. It's not what happened.

Yeah what's also a bit frustrating is that people like Joe Rogan are openly discussing the controversial stuff people don't wanna hear and are getting SLAMMED on Reddit for deviating even just slightly from what the government has chosen to do along with the medical leaders. Most of the smart people I know think that widespread lockdowns are an extremely heavy-handed solution that will lead to more harm than good. History is proving this day by day... It seems a nuanced approach to re-openings is simply too difficult to get right and therefore untenable, which is extremely sad.

The problem is not JR, it's the people who listen to him and take his every word as some sort of ultimate truth.

I don't blame him. Human nature is to wield power. The more power the person has, in whatever form it is, the more inventive ways he will come up with to use it for his goals, be they selfish or otherwise.

JR would shut his mouth if his audience chided him to being conspiratorial.

The society has lost the ability to think critically. And the focus on individuality has exacerbated the problem. I don't mind individuality in matters such as personal growth, morality, religion, etc, but there are some aspects of social life where collective expert decisions must hold higher weight than individual opinions, such as in public health, defense, etc.

> the people who listen to him and take his every word as some sort of ultimate truth.

They don't really exist. At least not in any significant number. This is just a straw man to attack Joe Rogan.

history is proving no such thing. you have no idea what the alternate history would have been

See this is my point. "You have no idea what would have happened" is an opt-out of a conversation. You can't deny the negative effects of lockdown. The point is that other solutions should be tried because the current one clearly has disastrous consequences. For example, an alternate solution could be tried in a small microcosm as a sort of A/B test, but no one is really entertaining that possibility, and anyone who does is hit with contentless comments such as yours. Thinking is hard, but it's time for everyone to start.

no it is not an opt-out of conversation. It's a point that you made a massive oversimplification and yourself opted out of thinking. You just basically said, lockdown = bad consequences, non-lockdown = good consequences. non-lockdown could have had 2x, 4x, 10x, 100x, 1x, 0.5x the infections. We don't know which. You ignored all those possibilities and their repercussions and just stated lockdown has been disastrous implying that non-lockdown would have been less disastrous. you don't know that. I for one believe non-lockdown would have been more disastrous. Hospitals would be more full, more people would be dying, people would be even more desperate than they are, the result would be an even worse economy and more suffering

> You just basically said, lockdown = bad consequences, non-lockdown = good consequences

I'm sorry but your comment shows that you did not read my comment. Please read:

> deviating even just slightly from what the government has chosen to do

> nuanced approach to re-openings is simply too difficult to get right and therefore untenable

What part of "deviating just slightly" and "nuanced approach" implies a complete inverse approach? I think you are straw-manning me, sorry. I never said that the solution was to not have lockdown at all. You can re-read my comment again if it helps. I implied that a nuanced approach and a slightly less restrictive approach would be better. It seems that my comment regarding people unwilling to have a nuanced conversation proves true again.

Maybe you shouldn't have said "the lockdown had disastrous consequence" because the obvious retort is "compared to what"

You seem to continue putting words in my mouth. What's up with that? Here's what I said:

> other solutions should be tried because the current one clearly has disastrous consequences

Given the context of my other comments, you seem to have reached the wrong interpretation, and are still unwilling to entertain a conversation about what a milder lockdown looks like.