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Comment by rfreiberger | Hacker News Reader

My father works in Taiwan and he was aware something bad was coming down well before it hit US news. This was late January 2020, and by then most all of the masks at the stores were sold out, followed shortly by the cleaning supplies. I would say the majority of buyers were shipping these back to family in Asia or they were prepairing for the peak that hit a few weeks later.

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I bought a bunch of N95 masks the day after I heard China was locking down Wuhan. There were still plenty of masks at regular prices at the time.

I bought them right around the time officials started admitting they were helpful.

$120 for a box of ten N95 masks.

I'm baffled that anybody ever thought they weren't helpful. As if we haven't been using masks against airborne diseases for the past hundred years. But suddenly they would be useless against Covid. Then they point to one or two studies as if they support their argument, when there were at least as many at the same time showing the opposite. Also ignoring decades of evidence of the efficacy of masks. I thought I was taking crazy pills. The default for all airborne disease in the absence of significant evidence (particularly in the case of a novel one) is to use masks. Anything else is pure idiocy.

By the time officials admitted they were "helpful" (because of course they were, there's nothing particularly special about Covid in that respect), it was already way too late to get masks. Because anybody with any basic knowledge of disease and medicine had already bought up all the supply long before.

Another way of looking at it is in a betting scenario. I want to make money. The two options I can bet on are

a) Based on decades of scientific evidence, buy fuck loads of masks on the likelihood of them being anywhere from moderately to highly effective.

b) Masks are useless based on two early studies in a highly unstable situation with little accurate information and low confidence, counter to established medical practice with no other basis in reliable evidence.

Guess what I'm betting on. Further, the risks associated with being wrong are far lower with option A than with option B.

Oh I agree completely. I think at the time many of us could read between the lines and see what was really happening: They were preventing a run on masks, and medical professionals needed all they could get.

I don't like being lied to, but in this case I think I have some forgiveness because the end goal was justified (at least in my mind). It's such a weird feeling though, I'm very conflicted about it.

I don't think people assumed that it was coming to the US, but covid was definitely in public awareness by late January.

Some proportion of those people are disaster preppers that bought a ton of masks, just like the toilet paper people.

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