So much of our early thinking and statements about COVID were wrong. And it was pushed by hysterical media and governments as the truth and you better not think anything else. This is what leads to skepticism and resentment by the public.
1. it gives people agency to not freak out because they can be proactive about something. the reason nuclear energy is a boogieman is that you can't see it and it can kill you and there's is little you can do as an individual to protect yourself against it.
2. they truly didn't know how the spread of the disease is since it was a novel virus. you do however know that the lipid barrier of it makes it susceptible to soap and 70% isopropyl alcohol.
3. saying "there is no evidence that masks are effective" is true in the scientific sense. they didn't do studies so to talk about the effectiveness would have been backwards (also considering at the time they didn't know if it would actually increase the spread due to touching/collection/whatever) scientific illiteracy is a problem. the words and processes have precise meanings and those ignorant to it will glom onto certain words out of context and use that as evidence for their conspiracy theories. (see isolation of the virus et al)
2. It was't just a novel virus, it was a novel coronavirus and we know all about how those spread.
3. It's the job of government agencies and officials to use communications skills to avoid these issues. If they talk like pedantic scientists then their messaging will fail, and if they don't know that they are in the wrong job.
But how could one have been sure that a mutation has not changed certain behaviors in dangerous ways. Given potential adverse impact I have no problems overcompensating in the caution department till more light is shed and at that point one needs to dial down.
Personally I am very disappointed in the media coverage of the science applicable to this pandemic, specifically how much supposition is interjected by non-experts. For the clicks, I guess.
[0] https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-cor...
I was not sure what to make of that, precisely for the reason you mention.
But that is of secondary importance, because early in the pandemics a lot of health organizations made it very clear that not using masks should be the policy. It wasn't a communication problem, they were just lying to people to get to a goal (masks not disappearing from the market, a good goal). That's wrong on many different ways.
Then suddenly we got a few studies settling down that masks worked, and on the 2 or 3 days it took for those studies to be known both camps completely reversed their messages and insisted that they always had that new message and never changed their anything.
I fully believe masks help, despite as you say, there being little specific evidence for Covid19, because we have good reason to think they reduce transmission just based on how masks work, evidence in general to support masks in a medical setting, and the transmission mechanism of the virus.
However, I have zero sympathy for the authorities struggling to get people to take them seriously about masks after they started off by lying about it.
And after an established history of authorities and politicians lying, it's little wonder conspiracy theories proliferate. You reap what you sow.
we didn't know then which masks were also going to be effective and didn't know if those masks would be worse than not wearing one at all. there was also the issue of shortages of the effective masks for medical pros that needed them. that informed the speaking at the time and at no point was that a lie. and we do have studies now that masks do decrease the likelihood of transmission so we do know now that those cloth masks are effective.
1. shortage of proper n95 masks(look at toilet paper during the beginning)
2. no evidence of other masks being useful or not harmful at the time so they said socially distance yourself as a primary mode of protection and wash your hands often.
It certainly was: https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/29/health/face-masks-coronavirus.... That's not a statement that mask effectiveness is uncertain, it's an authoritative statement that they don't help.
It would be difficult to prove they definitely lied without an admission of guilt or leaked internal communications.
Can you post a link to the published studies that you think CDC / WHO should have been using to inform their decisions around masks?
> evidence in general to support masks in a medical setting
We really do have lots of testing for masks in medical settings, and most of them struggle to show benefit.
I don't want to say that's impossible that we're doing something widely despite it being ineffective - because that does happen. But the burden of proof is on you if you want to make such a strong claim against the consensus view, and I reject your attempt to foist it on me.
Probably you'll counter that you're just talking specifically about the public using masks to prevent covid19, and I agree the evidence to support that is thin. But that's to be expected, because it's also new. Again we have good reason to suspect that if masks work at preventing spread of respiratory illness in a medical setting, they should work for the public with covid19 too. So if you want to claim that, again the burden of proof is on you to make a strong case against the consensus view of the general efficacy of masks in preventing spread of respiratory illness.
This is a common argument, but it is honestly kind of ridiculous. Like how can you claim with a straight face both:
a) Authorities lied about masks not working, and
b) Since authorities are known liars (see a), their current claims that masks do work must be untrue.
Do these people really not know there is now broad consensus in what people knowledgeable on the topic believe works, or are they just making bad faith arguments because they don't want to follow it?
The dangers of crying wolf.
I mean, I don't think there is broad consensus. I think there is a hell of a lot of group think going on. Going against the grain literally gets you ridiculed, mocked, harassed, called an idiot and if you are in the medical industry... probably gets you on the blacklist.
I don't trust a single bit of research generated about masks, or anything, while in the middle of a politically charged pandemic. All of it should be taken with a very healthy grain of salt.
The idea that every intelligent, well meaning person agrees with what we are doing is lunacy. It would be insane to think that. This whole thing went from "go on cruises" to "lock it all down" in literally a week's time. Of course intelligent, well intentioned people might not agree with what is going on. It amazes me that people assume everybody smart has to be for all this.
"The blacklist"? Which one is that?
No, they did do lots of studies for flu, and they really struggle to find a benefit for masking. Importantly, the quality of evidence for masks as source control (infected people wear masks to prevent transmission) was really bad.
(People should wear masks)
It turns out that if you give a public official purview over something and don’t make him or her very answerable to other officials, that public official will get comfortable being heavy-handed and failing to adequately explain things to the citizenry.
Drawing a very bright, very wide, strongly-enforced safety line well away from any potential hazard has value.
Public health in pandemics is all about consistently breaking transmission chains. And even countries with initial or eventual success can remain at risk of resumed high infection rates, as is evident currently in India (doubling daily infections over a week: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india/), Turkey, Brazil, Poland, Germany, and in parts of the US (notably Michigan, at this writing).
But in a world in which modest and reasonable requests to wear masks result in angry outbursts to murderous rage ... I could also be convinced to draw a firmer line.
Again: the matter is nuanced.
My understanding is that closer to the city, more people are wearing masks outdoors but the walking paths are more crowded as well.
On the other hand, that rage (but not murderous) is justified if the request isn’t based in any reasonable understanding of disease spread and is just an expression of power over that individual. Such as outside in the woods.
It also has harms: it decreases respect for rules that actually do make sense, and it can encourage people to substitute more dangerous activities. If Alice values taking a walk outside without a mask at 50, walking with a mask at 30, and going to a shopping mall (with a mask) at 40, strictly enforcing outdoor mask mandates is going to make her both less happy and more at risk.
People are quick to make decisions that they consider self-protective, rather than decisions that are protective of the most vulnerable. The goal of public health should be to affect global health good with edge cases considered, understanding the narcissistic way their messaging will be received.
Somewhere in there, there was also at least one published study that suggested the virus could at least theoretically stay on even surfaces like cardboard for an extended period. Which is how people got to leaving their Amazon boxes for three days and spending two hours to deep clean all their groceries.
This seems more than a little exaggerated. Even in the early stuff I saw about cleaning surfaces expressed uncertainty about it.
Any time a new disease appears, most of the advice you're going to get will be stuff they thought up in advance. Washing your hands and cleaning more aren't normally going to hurt anything, so you'll probably see that every time some new disease pops up.
Enforcing policy that may be beneficial or neutral in the face of unknowns is perfectly valid. If you felt you were lied to you really just weren't paying attention.
So much of the early discussion around covid was about how little we knew. I think we were generally adequately informed about the likelihood that our early understanding would change.
Now, of course, there was hysteria and people making overly strong claims. But that’s nothing new or specific to our covid response.
Some people might have problems with the strong recommendations from authorities/experts, given the lack of information. But keep in mind that not recommending action was also a very strong and risky stance, given what we knew. So there was no choice. Guesses had to be made, one way or the other, and of course some of them would turn out to be wrong.