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Comment by themitigating | Hacker News Reader

"CDC spent over a month spewing bullshit telling people not to wear masks because masks don't stop the spread of COVID."

Can you provide the source for this?

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I have personally had discussions with people about this. I’m about as liberal as they come, but a lot of covid guidance was confusing in the beginning and I think that admitting that has somehow become taboo. It’s still weird that I feel the need to clarify my political stance on an apolitical issue like this. As time went on messaging improved, but the initial confusion was definitely there.

Nobody knew what was going on, I read as much about covid as I could (including HN comments about something to do with quinine that was popular for a day or two)

This is the source I found https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cd...

I think there is a big time Mandela effect here. I remember “don’t buy masks” as being about preserving masks for essential workers and medical professionals, I don’t necessarily recall the portion where they said it didn’t help infection rates, but yet there it is.

> "a lot of covid guidance was confusing in the beginning and I think that admitting that has somehow become taboo."

I think any reasonable person can acknowledge there's a huge leap between "I was confused by what you said" and "YOU LIED TO ME!!!!"

It's almost as though they were operating with incomplete, imperfect information at that time, and they needed to make some best-effort guesses based on previous events.

Late Feb 2020 until early April 2020 https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cd...

It is clear that the message in almost all that mask communication was that masks actually do work, but please save them for medical personnel... here are a few weak reasons why they probably won't help you that much anyway.

And comparatively, they are way more critical for medical personnel. They should have just communicated it that way rather than trying to downplay effectiveness. Shortages abounded anyway.

“The” source?

Assuming you were alive and paying any attention the past two years, the source would be your own eyes and ears, consuming the (US) CDC’s official communications. I wasn’t even in the US and encountered them! In fact, I once even repeated one of their false claims about masks very early last year during a recorded zoom call with a friend. Then after looking at the very different claims from my local CDC, I realized the US one was wrong.

I think so much of the messaging would have been better if there were disclaimers about “we are still doing research” and “based on our knowledge at this time”… or even timeboxing the advice so it’s updated every 12-48 hours even if unchanged.

This specific messaging has been a rallying point for people who don’t even believe covid exists. At least that was the case in the US

I was in Taiwan (and also was for the first SARS), and I think the messaging here was much more competent but also more humble and less aggressive than much of the rest of the world’s.

To be fair though, the VP was an epidemiologist, so there was an unfair advantage.

In America we were already in such a weird situation I doubt anything would’ve truly been 100% effective. It’s interesting to hear these different perspectives though

To be clear, I think that lockdowns are a gross affront to civil liberties and unjustified for anything under a 10 (and probably even) 20 percent lethality rate.

My opinion at the time (when vaccines looked very distant) was that places like Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea could still control the pandemic via border quarantines and contact tracing (which happened) and that places like the US also could also achieve good results via mass testing (which didn’t happen).

It would have taken about a billion tests per week, but the US certainly had the industrial capacity do it. The problem, IMO, was lack of state capacity. Even as the pandemic spread around the world, the FDA continued processing applications for PPE producers, vaccines and everything else at the same sluggish rate (of a 6+ months delay) that it had been.

Tyler Cowen spoke at length about this on various economics and other podcasts.

Which btw in the early days, think early march 2020, a 10% ifr was still on the table. Italy and wuhan (incomplete) data was … not encouraging. And remember that SARS-cov-1 had an ifr of 40%. And was spread by fomites.

So in early 2020, with limited data - china really screwed is here - the initial lockdowns in places like SF Bay Area made sense. But the lockdown didn’t persist of course and realistically speaking people always had freedom of movement: the police were NOT and we’re directed to not aggressively ticket/arrest: all those contacts just increased the chance of infection anyways.

Now as for the rest of the US I disavow what happened there.

In most cases it was. But the 15 seconds that would get distilled down for the short cable news attention spans didn't usually include it.

https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_e58c20c6-8...

They've used two different narratives at two far apart times that CNN highlights quite well.

Don't forget the CDC and FDA completely fucked up COVID testing at the start. The FDA banned unapproved lab tests, and wouldn't quickly approve the tests, The test the CDC developed that they forced everyone to use was shit and didn't work properly.

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