I'm going to be blunt here. No one with medical training thought this wasn't airborne.
The debates about masks in the west, even after production ramped up, were a consequence of the initial confusing messages from officials. I've never seen it debated in Asia where they had masks available from the start.
This wasn't the first rodeo for SE Asia, scars of past pandemics has made the response here much more automatic, orderly and effective.
I think also supplies of masks etc were much more robust here because they were already worn in daily life due to pollution, normal sickness, etc and a massive medical tourism industry that was about to be shutdown and have their supplies made available.
> Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.
However, when you have a limited supply of masks, it's impossible to give them out to every potentially-infected person, so saving them for high-risk people (like healthcare professionals, who also have the highest risk of becoming infected themselves) is still rational.
If you got a different impression than this message, blame wherever you get your news from.
> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
It's hard to get more direct than that. It wasn't just about preserving supply for healthcare workers, high-level government officials were explicitly stating that masks were not effective for the general public.
Fortunately we have archives of all this stuff, as many statements (like this one) were later deleted.
You will also note that in the early pandemic, it was completely unclear that non-N95 masks, such as surgical masks (let alone cotton masks) would have a positive benefit. That changed later on, of course.
That statement reflected the best information available at the time, but it was designed to be as simple and actionable as possible, not to communicate highly-technical nuance.
I of course knew that was BS from the get-go. But nonetheless they did say it.
- Jerome Adams, former US Surgeon General, M.D.
Airborne/aerosol transmission was only acknowledged by the WHO and CDC in May of 2021, over a year after the pandemic was declared. And taking that long to acknowledge it makes me think it wasn't just a strategic lie to preserve the supply of respirators for medical staff.
and when the initial scientific articles about COVID air spreading (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article) came out, many policy makers were truly terrified of making announcements that would cause worldwide panic.
The new coronavirus is likely spreading through the air to some degree, the top U.S. infectious disease official said on Friday, one day after the World Health Organization urged further studies on the ways the virus is transmitted.
“Still some question about aerosol but likely some degree of aerosol,” Anthony Fauci, the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said by video during a panel session at a COVID-19 conference organized by the International AIDS Society.
Fauci on Thursday had said it was a “reasonable assumption” that airborne transmission was occurring even though there was not a lot of solid evidence behind it. The WHO urged more studies on the issue.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-meetin...