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https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/when-should-i-wear... (this article is from 1 year ago today).

>It was simply unclear whether cloth masks or the simple medical masks would help significantly if the population would wear them.

That is under-stating what the early messaging was. In Canada, the official messaging was not neutral, it was actively anti-mask early on. It focused entirely on the potential (unproven at the time) dangers of wearing masks and discounted any potential (unproven at the time) benefits.

Given how many Asian countries were heavily using masks early on, given how many health professionals were arguing in favour of masks early on, and given how quickly policy did a 180 to mandatory masks, this messaging could only be one of three things: intentionally misleading to protect supplies of PPE, intentionally malicious (why??), or incompetence in communication strategy verging on criminal negligence.

I welcome any arguments to change my mind. That early messaging should not be underplayed as "it was complicated".

Another Canadian, chiming in with much the same experience.

I had some N95 masks from woodworking at the beginning of the pandemic. I remember the messagging being that the public should not buy N95s, and in fact if they had any, should donate them to hospitals.

I do not recall any messaging sayinig masks (N95 or otherwise) were harmful or there were any associated dangers. But they were pretty clear that you don't need them, and if you have them you should give them over. I 3D printed face shields to donate.

The reality was more nuanced. The messaging was that 1) there is no evidence that masks reduce risk of getting COVID; and 2) many people who wear masks tend to risk-compensate, e.g. standing closer to others in the queue than they would have if they were not wearing a mask. They wear a mask and feel safe, so they do things that put them in danger.

So if benefits may be zero and people are risk-compensating and living a more risky life because of the false sense of security that comes with a mask, people would be worse off if they wear a mask. This was all explained in the early days of the pandemic. It wasn't some hush-hush behind the curtains plot by the ruling class.

I remember reading it somewhere, though I cannot find it now so it may not have been true, that light cigarettes tend to be more harmful than regular ones: people who smoke them tend to inhale them deeper and smoke them more frequently than they would a regular cigarette, which negates the positive effects of using a light and then some. The mask concern was similar.

It was also suggested that masks would make people touch their faces more, back when surface transmission was believed to be more of a risk. Remember the run on surface disinfectants and those ridiculous grocery wiping videos?

> "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,"

I couldn't find the original Fauci quote, but the WHO quote from the linked article is a lot more nuanced than "masks don't work."

Samed with the linked FOX article about the CDC/the Surgeon General.

> “There may be a day when we change our recommendations particularly for areas that have large spread going on about wearing cotton masks, but again the data is not there yet,” he continued. “We are continuing to follow it.”

Unfortunately, when science is concerned, looks like politicians simply need to couch what they say with "this is what we believe we know now, but things may change". Otherwise, when things do change, everyone comes out of the woodwork to accuse them of lying. There's no nuance possible: "They said this thing early on, and later things changed and now we know it's not true. They lied!"

A lot of people simply hold politicians accountable for the very first things that they say, and if they ever change their mind later, that's "flip flopping" and it's interpreted as evidence that the first thing they say was a deliberate lie! They just can't grasp this idea that truth constantly changes as we learn more about the world.

There was decent evidence that both medical masks and N95s were effective against SARS-1 in a medical setting, and some weakish evidence that they worked in a community setting.

There was really no good reason to believe that they wouldn't work to some degree for the general public. Concerns about the lack of fit testing could have been mostly alleviated by instructing people on the importance of and how to perform a pressure check themselves.

The original concern seemed to be about supply, as people were specifically instructed not to buy N95s. Of course, that didn't stop the Chinese government and Chinese aid groups from buying essentially everything in the supply chain and shipping it to Wuhan. If supply concerns were the real issue, it's difficult to understand how this was allowed to happen, but the government was making a lot of mistakes back then.

> I'm not convinced that authorities were lying about masks. The actual situation was kind of complex back then, and certainly prone to oversimplification, but that is still very different from actual deception.

I tend to agree.

My reasoning, at least for Canada last year, was we were following the WHO advice with respect to Influenza. I say this because Dr. Tam is part of the WHO, cited the organization numerous times throughout Q1 2020, and I've read the recommendations document which was published before Covid-19. The document did not recommend mask usage or border restrictions until a situation got out of hand, mostly due to a sparseness of studies suggesting the efficacy of masks.

Of course, IMO the major flaw was they assumed Covid-19 was like the flu. We in Canada should've looked to Asia who experienced SARS with us and follow suit with their rapid strategy rather than assuming we had Western exceptionalism and that it wouldn't come across the ocean.

> And at the same time there was a concern about shortages of PPE like N95/FFP2/KN95 masks.

Why not simply... make more?

> Both can be true, that we have good evidence that N95 masks work for professionals in direct contact with patients and in combination with other safety procedures and that we didn't have good evidence that masks (whether N95 or other) would help for regular people.

Yeah, because we all know the third year of Med School teaches you how to wear a mask. Without that crucial bit of knowledge you really can't wear one.

They were / are making more, there's masks piled up left and right everywhere I go. But it took a while for the production to get up to speed. Many factories converted to making masks, and within weeks after the start of the 'rona outbreak in the west they were churning them out by the millions per day.

But there was some inertia. Most of that stuff is made at scale in the East (speaking in very broad terms), which takes a few weeks to ship to the West. Some would have been made 'over here', but not that much.

Another factor was testing that the masks are up to spec. In hospitals etc they would be hesitant to get masks from a company that used to make other textiles if they haven't been vetted for the production of medical or N95 masks yet.

And a final factor was simply fuckery with companies vs government contracts. Plenty of companies offered that they could or had made masks to the various governments (I'm thinking of NL and the UK at the moment), but said governments did not go for it. Instead, they funneled billions to shell companies that only existed for a few weeks, placing orders for millions of units of PPE. On new companies. With a postal address at best. That did not have production plants.

I hope there will be / there is a big investigation and anyone that was involved in funneling billions to these shell companies, I presume for personal gain, get put away for a long time.

> "Why not simply... make more?"

besides the obvious lack of spare manufacturing capacity, we didn't really need to. we already had the simpler, more effective, and immediately available mitigation of distancing. masks are for performative signaling and any old piece of cloth is fine for that, as we saw eventually be recommended.

Distancing is not adequate to prevent spread indoors. There are loads of cases of infection from beyond that distance.

The problem is that distancing has huge economic downsides whereas masks have none.

> "The problem is that distancing has huge economic downsides whereas masks have none."

the question was about making more masks, which is literally limited by economic realities. you'd also need to provide at least some rationale for the rest of your statement for it to be taken seriously.

Also, there are a lot of influenza studies that said mask wearing for asymptomatic wasn't very effective at all. There are some that said there was an appreciable benefits, but overall the studies were mixed at best. Nobody thought mask wearing would give good protection during flu season.

So I think the initial instinct was to assume COVID would be roughly similar to influzenia. But what wasn't then known what that COVID had a significantly larger % of pre-symptomatic spread. This changes the calculus significantly. Something like 50% of covid spread happens before symptoms. Flu is much much lower.

I also think the effectiveness of masks (for currently non-symptomatic people) is an open question. It's certainly helpful, but the idea that has taken hold that "if everyone just wore their masks it would be over soon" is bullshit. It's a cheap and easy way to reduce transmission rate, but not enough to get below 1.

I certainly wear one inside (and have a good one now)--and to me it falls into the can't hurt/may help a bit category. At this point, wearing them distanced outside and/or pulling up a neck gaiter for a few seconds when you pass someone on a trail is pretty much theater though.

That's exactly where I am on that matter. I don't wear one walking my dogs because virtually nobody catches covid based on walking past someone on the side walk.

I'm okay wearing one inside even after full vaccination until everyone has a chance to get one. It's theater at that point, but its impossible to tell a vaccinated person from vaccinated just by looking at them. So I understand making everyone do it.

> "...but its impossible to tell a vaccinated person from vaccinated just by looking at them. So I understand making everyone do it."

no, that's the same kind of ignoble lie that degrades trust, and blindly accepts mass coercion to boot. we shouldn't promote such dishonesty, nor ill-defined use of force.

I agree they shouldn't lie about the purpose. But they don't have to.

Instead of "you have to wear a mask because VACCINES DONT WORK" (which is the current, deeply stupid, messaging), they could just say "everyone has to wear a mask b/c we don't know who is vaccinated and who isn't."

you seem to be missing the obvious non-totalitarian option:

if you’re vaccinated, you’ve already drastically reduced your chances of spreading the virus to others, and it’s overwhelmingly unlikely that wearing a mask will lower that risk meaningfully further.

that also has the positive knock-on effect of encouraging vaccination as an avenue toward herd immunity, rather than the punitive inverse, which discourages it.

This idea that we didn't know about asymptomatic spread in Feb/Mar is revisionist history. There were many, many reports of it coming out of China, and it was being talked about a lot.

Even in the U.S., we had several documented instances in March of asymptomatic superspreader events, including the Skagit Choir on March 10.

It would have been one thing if public health officials had remained neutral on mask wearing, but instead they actively discouraged it, and promoted interventions like hand washing and disinfecting surfaces, which had no real scientific support and are now believed to be essentially ineffective.

> It's a cheap and easy way to reduce transmission rate

Calling them "easy" or "cheap" dismisses all the negatives. It's not cheap or easy for people who have to wear them 8+ hours a day at work.

There are now a set of children born into a world never having seen a strangers face. Plenty of data out there on how important seeing faces is to infant brain development.

It makes many activities a pain in the ass. For example I could never dream of wearing a mask while working out at a gym... I don't care what "the experts" say it is disgusting to even consider wearing a mask over my sweaty face. Experts who say it is is fine to do so are just gaslighting the public.

It also is just ugly to look at. It is a constant reminder to be afraid.

It was one thing if it was a few weeks. But this has been going on for almost 9 months now in many places.

Calling it "cheap" and "easy" just shrugs off and dismisses peoples feelings. It's a form of gaslighting, really. Gaslighting has been a constant thing for the entire duration of this. Anybody who expresses anything other than max-doom and max-panic is told in no uncertain terms they are crazy and need to shut up, stop thinking and blindly listen to the "experts".

> "It also is just ugly to look at. It is a constant reminder to be afraid."

yes, that's the point of them. distancing, despite being a better general mitigation, isn't unambiguously obvious enough, so we have masks to drive the point home.

The messaging was "Masks Don't Work" and that the virus was not airborne. The extensive studies proving that those are both false did not exist, but it was heavily suspected. We were lied to is an oversimplification, but it's not even remotely wrong.

I get where you're coming from but the fact remains that experts had strong suspicions and beliefs that masks, and in particular N95 masks would give protection against the virus. And they did not communicate this with the public because they were afraid of shortages for essential workers.

Experts were deliberately "shading facts" or leaving out important context to influence the public to act a certain way.

That's really not much different than lying! I would argue it is lying but others might disagree.

The end result was that for at least a few weeks Americans went around believing masks don't work. I vividly remember reading these reports and telling friends "well y'know they aren't recommending masks I guess they don't work to protect you". I wasn't alone all the people in my friend group came to the same conclusion.

And yes the experts are smart! They can hide behind "well we never explicitly said they didn't work!", or "we didn't have all the data and didn't feel confident recommending them"

But they were not transparent about what they knew! And the reason they weren't being transparent was to protect mask supplies for medical personnel.

People can hide behind the legalese and lawyerly defense of "well it wasn't technically a lie!" but to many normal people like myself that's just laughable! The intent was to mislead the public! Most people just consider that lying...

We call this a lack of leadership, which, let's face it, becomes very, very obvious the more you paid attention to how the US handled Covid throughout 2020

There may have been weak leadership at the federal level, but that’s not the same thing as the tone and direction of professional messaging from the medical community. The US mask story was just very convoluted and lacked policy or professional confidence.

It's hard to be confident or establish guidance when there isn't much data.

In general, the CDC and medical community offers information and guidance, not policy (which is what the feds dropped the ball on). Which they did. Unfortunately, nuanced and evolving guidance leads to conspiracy theories, claims of lies, and even just unintentional distortions.

You're simply convinced that knowingly telling falsehoods isn't lying, if it is done by people in leadership posititions, with the calculated beneficial social effect (and the calculations turn out to be right).

Knowingly telling falsehoods is only lying when it's done for reasons like personal gain, avoiding blame and covering up misdeeds.

The population doesn't deserve the truth, and reacts badly to it; it is better if the people are steered like livestock. Or perhaps treated like children. Children are told lies with a view toward controlling their behavior.

rather than rephrashing, i'll just repeat what i posted yesterday about what fauci said a year ago[0]:

> "what fauci said was true (given tolerance for the natural ambiguity inherent in speech). in most cases, masks have been, and continue to be, primarily a palliative and signaling device, not a mitigation. for healthcare workers, it's actually an augmentative mitigation used with other imperfect mitigations in controlled circumstances to get the best possible outcomes from their use. masks are poorer mitigations in most general circumstances in comparison to the easier alternative that is (context-specific) distancing."

>

> "at various points, he's buckled to the prevailing political winds to keep his job, but that particular statement was a moment of lucidity and frankness. it threatened the dominant mediopolitical narrative, so he eventually backed off."

masks are valuable to politicians and the media for the concrete feedback it provides for their own power and voice. it emboldens politicians as the first order effect, while other order effects are simply not that important to them. that's what "politicizing masks" means.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26604508

>I'm not convinced that authorities were lying about masks. The actual situation was kind of complex back then, and certainly prone to oversimplification, but that is still very different from actual deception.

Lots of videos that you can watch on youtube. Fauci and WHO later admitted that they lied because they wanted to reserve masks for hospital/emergency people.

It's not a question of whether or not they were lying. They admit they lied. That makes them liars and then all of their assertions after that date must be taken as probably a lie.

We then had '2 weeks lockdown' to flatten the curve. Which was a lie. We are over a year now.

Moreover, when Fauci and co switched tune and started saying everyone had to wear masks. They said it 'so that we can reopen.' Which was a lie. Everyone is wearing masks and lockdowns still happening.

https://www.who.int/news/item/20-01-2021-who-information-not...

Basically everyone was running PCR tests at 38 cycles. Fauci has come out and explained that 35 is the max. Anything over 35 is a worthless test that's a false positive.

Even more important: All those 'asymptomatic' carriers. Ya those are false positives. In fact at a minimum the worldwide numbers are inflated nearly 100% or more. https://www.uchealth.org/today/the-truth-about-asymptomatic-...

It's just another lie. Maybe there's another good reason to lie? Perhaps to stop spread you need false positives and not false negatives? I'm sure we all know about confidence levels. Perhaps the real reason is that they want to inflate numbers. If the numbers were 50-90% lower, could they justify lockdowns?

The problem with frequent and constant lying and getting caught. You become the boy who cried wolf.

What happens if a new virus starts spreading. Perhaps a far more deadly one. Are people going to believe the boy who cried wolf?

> Anything over 35 is a worthless test that's a false positive.

That's not a false positive. False positive happens when there are no viral particles in the sample, but the test comes back positive. Those are very rare with rt-PCR and can usually be tracked down to cross-contamination. Cycle count has nothing to with those.

If there is no SARS-CoV-2 genetic material in the sample, there's nothing for rt-PCR to amplify.

> That's not a false positive.

"Moreover, positive real-time reverse transcription (rRT)-PCR test results that are close to the limit of detection (LOD) of an assay have a greater likelihood of being false positives. One key explanation for this is that when specimens become contaminated with very low levels of test target during the laboratory testing process, it produces a high Ct positive result near the assay LOD."

https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/ma...

>That's not a false positive. False positive happens when there are no viral particles in the sample, but the test comes back positive. Those are very rare with rt-PCR and can usually be tracked down to cross-contamination. Cycle count has nothing to with those.

You're not arguing with me. You are arguing with Fauci. https://youtu.be/a_Vy6fgaBPE?t=231

If you could explain to me if you don't mind. Why are you saying Fauci is wrong? Was he lying again?

>If there is no SARS-CoV-2 genetic material in the sample, there's nothing for rt-PCR to amplify.

I made my entire post literally Fauci and not me at all. I made no comments or assertions.

Here Dr. Fauci is answering a different question: whether a patient with positive rt-PCR test result is still infectious (shedding virus that is replication capable).

rt-PCR test cannot distinguish between live, replication-capable SARS-CoV-2 and its remains, or inactivated copies. It detects short snippets of genetic material, not the entire virus.

I think we have come to a complication. My understanding of his words and the situation is what I posted. Yes they are talking about shedding the virus but it doesnt change the subject.

You can read much more in depth about why there was a bad cycle #. At the time of creating the rules they didn't have a real copy of the infected person. They simulated it. https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download

It was a mistake on their part, but the reasoning is irrelevant here. Mistakes are going to happen during a crisis.

The problem is the ongoing pattern of lying.

I genuinely people like Tam and Fauci are trying to the do the right thing but it sets for extreme levels of distrust by lying. The next pandemic may be much worse because we simply lost trust in experts because they lied.

I'm not saying that Dr. Fauci wasn't lying. He was, about masks, about washing hands, about "no evidence" of virus being airborne, about length of lockdown, etc.

I'm just saying that this particular argument, about cycle count and false positives, is not one of those cases.

PCR tests have very low false positives. If you've got a tiny spec whatever genetic material the machine is set to amplify... it will happily do so.

The intent of covid tests isn't to see if you have a tiny insignificant spec of SARS-CoV-2 in your nasal passage. The intent is to see if you have Covid19 and are possibly contagious. When you amplify too much, you are defeating the purpose of the test. A tiny spec of remnant SARS-CoV-2 doesn't mean you are contagious or have Covid19. It just means you have a tiny spec of viral material up in your nose.

The problem is that you may be in an early stage of infection where there isn't much virus, or the swab may not have caught much of it. You could also have already recovered from an asymptomatic infection, and there is some residual viral RNA. A high Ct could be because of one of those factors, or from cross-contamination.

That's why COVID-19 is diagnosed not only by rt-PCR, but also on the basis of symptoms, chest CT scans, and other nucleic acid testing.