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Comment by blago | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 )

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.

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