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Comment by kspacewalk2 | Hacker News Reader

At the time there was a severe shortage of even surgical masks, so it was a very good decision to ensure medical professionals have a plentiful supply. The panic/hoarding of masks would have endangered their lives in March and April of 2020. Note how the advice on mask wearing took a steep turn right around the time the supply issues were essentially resolved. Not a coincidence.

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I have more than vivid memory of the situation - I took part of an effort to ship PPE to friends and family in Asia in January and I started to keep notes as soon as I realized that people are attempting to rewrite what happened.

By 02/02/2020 masks were no longer available in retail channels in the US. Not on Amazon, not in your local store, not at any price.

Retailers ware not competing with hospitals for mask allocations - they we simply cut out. There was even an article on Bloomberg which I can't find right now that talked about supply channels and why your Walgreens won't be stocking masks anytime soon.

The notion that we were told a noble white lie to help protect our health professionals was invented a few months later to whitewash the incredible incompetence of our health officials/administration at the time.

My cousin has a drywall business, they stopped being able to buy n95 masks AFTER Dr. Tam made her statements. Might have gone in a different order the US, but you could still get n95 masks in Home Depot in Canada when our top health officials were asking us not to buy them.

In Czech Republic we were much lower down the food chain when it came to masks, so there was no hope of getting them early on in the pandemic. So something novel happened - people were encouraged[0] to sew their own and wear them at all times. Over the course of a week or so we went from a country where mask-wearing was basically unheard of to everyone having their face covered when out in public. During that period (until ~September or so?) we frequently had the lowest number of daily cases-per-capita in Europe. Later the requirement for masks was removed altogether and all restrictions were relaxed ... then cases exploded to the point where we had the highest number in the world.

What I'm saying is - it looks like a bit of honesty and an encouragement for the general public to improvise face covering could have helped the USA and Canada despite the chronic lack of "real" PPE. The criminally negligent messaging around masks caused hesitation and doubt that was a gift to the covid deniers who to this day refer to that huge u-turn on masks.

[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/czechs-get-to-...

>I took part of an effort to ship PPE to friends and family in Asia in January

Apropos, when the similar effort by the "patriotic Chinese emigrants" here got reported in press, one common angle was to present it as a hostile act by the Chinese state and also a failure of Finnish state of not restricting the PPE sales.

edit. Ah, a part was that the operation was coordinated by an official in the Chinese embassy. (Paywalled link in Finnish https://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000007971030.html )

There was no shortage of t-shirts and even if wrapping a t-shirt around your head wasn't effective, at least it would have been logically consistent with the eventual messaging of "wear a better mask now that you can get them."

The experts decided to burn their own reputations for a short term benefit, and are paying the price now with vaccine hesitancy and growing ire towards experts.

Yes. I really got the impression that Dr. Tam and the other experts were throwing "civilians" under the bus to keep the n95 masks for the medical profession.

The criminal part is downplaying airborne transmission risks so your "no masks" story doesn't fall apart.

At one point, ER Docs and Nurses were wearing goggles, face shields, double masking (n95 + surgical masks) and experimenting with microwaving the n95s for reuse and Dr. Tam was STILL saying there was no proof it was airborne.

Being a Canadian, this particular incident gave me so much mistrust in our government. It woke me up to the fact that I am not being told the truth but that I am being manipulated. I haven’t trusted a single word from officials since then.

That seems like an over-reaction: you really haven't trusted a single word from any official because of one official being misleading?

>one official

Do you want to stand by that statement or withdraw it?

> this particular incident gave me so much mistrust in our government.

It's literally in the comment.

I don't think anything they said stopped people from trying to purchase masks. Certainly a majority of the population decided not to, but very quickly all masks that were available to the public were bought.

In the end they had to control the medical supply chain. It's a lot more work than lying to the public, but it actually works. Unfortunately lying lost the trust of the public and COVID became a highly political issue.

"The authorities were lying to us" is not a very reassuring take but it's more reassuring than the truth, that in enormous part they're incompetent, actively dangerous morons. See how the FDA banned KN95s, how the CDC stopped the Seattle Flu Study from testing for COVID, the CDC's banning non-CDC laboratories from testing for COVID while itself screwing up tests, the endless delays with approving things like fractional dosing, boosters, neither using the AZ vaccines nor giving them away. At least they didn't get in the way of Operation Warp Speed too much.

They can both lie and be incompetent. In fact, I think there's probably a decent correlation between lying and incompetence.

The bulk purchase, hoarding and exfiltration of masks, disinfectant and similar goods by Chinese nationals living abroad under direction of the party into the home country to the detriment of the domestic populations happened anyway.

We'll never know, but I wonder if the government had said, "masks are good, but please PLEASE do not try to buy them. the government is purchasing what supply we have to save our doctors." Perhaps with the honesty, the medical professionals would have gotten the supplies they needed AND we would have less distrust in US healthcare institutions. The public trust that was lost from that first lie is significant, and I believe it hampers vaccination efforts to this day.

There's so much more they could have done, it's crazy that lying to the public is what they decided on. The media of course didn't help either, saying things like "Trump trying to fast-track vaccines could end up being worse than covid".

They weren't lying. They really believed what they were saying. They were idiots then and that should inform what you believe about them now and forevermore.

Because they know that people, myself including, are selfish and will prioritize their own and their loved one's safety over faceless and impersonal "medical professionals". As illogical as that may be or inefficient from a group context.

It's such a blatant, apologies for the hyperbole: "you are plebs and tax cattle, and not as important as these special people here".

It isn’t hard to make a mask. Distributing instructions so everyone could make their own would have saved lives.

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