What would author suggest in March last year? What would be a better option?
Were the establishment smart, they'd have no problem with vaccination hesitancy by saying that after vaccination you can resume normal life and ditch the masks. Instead it's been the outrageous message of "nothing will change."
You only have to see how the establishment has handled the obesity epidemic in the US to see whether any of their supposed intelligence and expertise accomplishes anything.
Human history has plenty of experience of what happens in epidemics when the response is not informed by science, and we do not need any more of that.
Furthermore, not erring on the side of caution is more frequently encouraged among those who are dismissive of the idea of using science to guide policy.
Like I said, you are proposing alternative science-based policies, which does not support the thesis of the article.
basic physics to be more precise
The myth of mask = protection completely ignores that the eyes are a bigger attack surface than the nostrils or closed mouth. Eye coverage is at least as important as masks, yet it was always ignored by mainstream US media.
Yes, but given the choice of there being a volleyball net between you and a BB gun shooter and there just being air, which do you choose?
That would have been a good reason to suggest wearing masks and also goggles. Personally I was wearing goggles in the beginning for that reason and still make sure to wear glasses since there is some evidence that they can help too. One wrong is still better than two wrongs.
The eyes are less of a problem because you don't breathe through your eyes. Only a limited amount of air contacts them, and no air is emitted from them.
Masks are at least as important for protecting others as for protecting yourself. They filter large volumes of air. Eye protection is useful if you're faced with people breathing directly in your face all day, but they're less important for people who can socially distance.
The technocratic apparatus might have been deployed toward a strategy of creative mitigation — say, mass manufacturing of N95 masks, test kits mailed to every American, testing at a large-enough scale to isolate only the actually infected instead of everyone. Instead, our leaders decided to indefinitely maintain crippling restrictions on individuals, schools, businesses, and social gatherings and take a Hail Mary pass at a vaccine, a gamble that paid off faster than we could have hoped and slower than we could bear.https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-scrapped-usp...
The previous administration had done nothing to maintain or replace the ample PPE inventory that the preceding administration had left it (in thoughtful response to SARS and H5N1).
In the United States at least, that's a bit of a cop out. Lockdowns were applied at the local level and were originally meant to buy time and prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. The Federal government could have then stepped in with mass manufacturing of masks and wide-scale testing. But Trump was reluctant to use the Defense Production Act, and Jared Kushner was put in charge of coordinating PPE supplies, and we saw how that worked out.
My main point was we should have had a coordinated response. Framing it as "leaders decided to indefinitely maintain crippling restrictions" is misleading. Lockdowns were necessary at the local level because there wasn't a coherent strategy at the national level. (Again, speaking only of the U.S.)
How? The shortage in March was one of the reasons why they did not recommend masks. Besides, the point made was tailored toward the negative attitude towards science in emarging crisis scenario - "The “science” [..] rarely resembles the centuries-old process of making informed guesses, testing hypotheses"
Did we have any superior alternatives?
And now, we're a year in and still we don't have actual N95 filtering masks everywhere. Most people are still wearing cloth.