>WHO say there is no evidence that asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus, and if you have the disease, people should stay indoors. Therefore the mask is redundant.
What if you're in the incubation period? AFAIK that doesn't count as being an "asymptomatic carrier" because you eventually show symptoms.
>I've even seen plenty of articles suggesting that wearing the mask is making things worse [...] The information overload is getting extreme.
Source for this? I've only heard of mask wearing making things worse by proxy (ie. you're depriving healthcare workers of masks). If that's the basis of those claims, it's totally consistent that masks are good and that masks are bad.
> WHO say there is no evidence that asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus
So, it's true that the WHO said that, although they've since clarified that by 'no evidence' they mean "we don't know", not "it doesn't happen". ('no evidence' is one of those phrases that people misunderstand). However, _pre-symptomatic_ cases are contagious, and there's no way to know if you're negative, asymptomatic, or pre-symptomatic, so as public health advice "asymptomatic people may not be contagious" is not useful (it's somewhat useful from and epidemiological standpoint).
> I've even seen plenty of articles suggesting that wearing the mask is making things worse
There were some early concerns that masks would make people act more riskily, but this doesn't seem to be the case.
> or that lockdowns are making things worse
Who claimed that?!
Look, in any emerging situation, there's a lot of confusion and uncertainty. But it now seems pretty clear that masks don't make things worse, and there's some reason to hope that they make things better. And they're cheap. So people should wear them.
> One thing that I learned from a recent trip to Hong Kong is that the logic behind the masks isn't to prevent you from picking up the virus (which of course is not effective, as you just said) but to stop you from infecting others with your coughs and sneezes.
Yes, this is the same advice that the CDC and WHO give. If you're unwell yourself, wear a mask to protect others. If you're not unwell, it's not necessary to wear a mask to prevent others from infecting you, as they haven't been shown to be effective when used in this way.
> From what I read, these are only useful if you're sick and trying to reduce transmission.
Governments have been telling this, as well, but it cannot be 100% true. I supposed it was a white lie to prevent people from stockpiling.
Otherwise, there would be no use in medical personnel using masks.
I can understand that face masks might not be the best measure for healthy people, I can understand that they might not be super-effective, I can also understand that only certain types of masks are effective, but I cannot rationally believe all masks are completely useless.
>wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all.
I remember this, at the time we knew people who were infected (and infectious) could take more than 10 days to show symptoms, and if they didn't wear a mask they could infect hundreds. We also knew that anything less than an N95 wasn't designed to protect the wearer anyway (though as it turns out it does), but rather everyone else from the wearer. So it was really disingenuous of them to suggest your mask doesn't protect you, as they knew its everyone else's mask than protects you..
By the time it hit Italy we knew it was airborne, even if not by official measure, out government and the WHO kept this BS up for months after that.
Maybe we watch different media, as i have seen nothing about this issue. A few articles online, hidden away, nothing proportional to the seriousness of the issue.
This is demonstrably false, as we now know for a fact that wearing a mask does reduce the risk of both catching the virus yourself and transmitting it to other people. Even if you don't care about your own well-being, common courtesy dictates you should care about the well-being of others. Failing to do so may indeed get them killed.
> to renowned Virologists stating that facemask usage is ineffective until the evidence was too overwhelming.
Source? I saw nothing of that. What I did saw was health officials dissuading the public from buying gloves and masks because they were in very short supply and the spike in demand was forcing frontline workers, those who actually need gloves and masks, to macguyver theirselves alternative protective equipment.
At most, I've only saw health officials state that mask usage among the general public was not an assurance of immunity because wearing a mask provided a false sense of protection, and could even be counterproductive because it motivated users to keep touching their faces.
> The conclusion was never drawn from a comparison between a) wearing a facemask in public, and b) not wearing a facemask in public.
Well, in fact, that's exactly what the conclusion was drawn from. If you're in public and not wearing a mask during a pandemic then the logical thing to do is to keep a lot of distance between yourself and others. There's a non-trivial amount of people who believe that masks are providing much more protection than they actually are and this misunderstanding could have an impact on people's behavior in public spaces.
> They said wearing masks does not help decrease infectious spread. They actually claimed that wearing masks can increase infectious spread because of improperly wearing it.
Can you please point to the studies claiming that masks significantly lower transmission rates? The only think I ever read was it lowers a bit the transmission FROM infected people by blocking some of the droplets sneezed/coughed, but just wearing them doesn't protect healthy people anyhow. Unless you have N95 + good glasses and perfect hygiene.
The behavior of 'I have a basic mask therefore I am protected' - I've seen it quite a few times personally. It really can lead to false feeling of security and lowering one's guard. I've seen folks wearing them incorrectly too, especially in the beginning - ie not over nose, huge gaps around it, putting it down in store for a call etc.
I think your statements are taken out of context of what was claimed. Not claiming WHO is perfect (far from it), but trump-ish bashing everybody and everything external instead of admitting one's utter failure and working on fixing things won't change much.
> No one I know who wore a mask properly and kept a distance from others were infected with covid.
This is curious as masks don’t protect from contracting covid. They protect from transmitting covid to others.
So it’s quite possible that your observation is accurate. But very unlikely it has anything to do with their mask usage. But there may be other behaviors responsible. Or just fortune.
> But we had just that... we had scientists and doctors telling us just last year (at the beginning of "the plague") that masks are useless for healthy people, and that they even present a higher risk to wearers, because they touch the mask and their face more.
> And then, one random saturday (in my country atleast), masks became mandatory, along with gloves to enter the stores. Some media outlets have even removed the previous newsstories (not edit and say "whoops, now we know better", but remove completely), and everybody acts as if that didn't happen.
sigh
There are nuances for that. First, there weren't enough masks and other PPE for medical personnel; second, there was already hoarding going on. Making masks mandatory at the beginning would have been disastrous and likely resulted in the deaths of many medical personnel, who were among the main limits of how many cases a country can take.
Then, you're missing a big difference between the initial "don't use masks" and later "everyone should mask up" guidances. The initial one was that you shouldn't wear a mask to protect yourself because untrained people were unlikely to wear them properly and would just touch themselves too much, thus wasting the precious resource. And of course, there was little certainty about how the virus spread and when ( do you spread it only when you have symptoms? do you spread it only if you have a positive test? )
The later one was due to knowing much better how the virus propagates, we can now conclude that wearing a mask stops people from spreading it, so everybody should wear a mask to stop community spread. There's a huge difference between wearing a mask to protect yourself from getting infected, and to stop unknowing sick people from spreading the virus via the main way it spreads. And of course, when that came about, there were just about enough masks in most countries to actually be able to do that.
Yes, it should have been handled better. Is it normal for such guidance to evolve considering the many known and unknown unknowns ? Absofuckinglutely. Would you have prefered for the guidance to stay the same for fear of looking stupid and wasting countless more lives?
> Same with trump + wuhan lab theory... at first it was a bannable offence on facebook to promote such idea... and now after trump, there are serious inquiries if that really happened, and we're allowed to discuss this again.
Again, nuance! What was bannable was claiming that China developed the virus on purpose. The lighter versions, like accidental lab leak, weren't banned ( that i recall; if you have a source stating otherwise i'd gladly retract that statement). In any case, any such discussion in the beginning seemed, to me at least, as deflections and excuses. We suck at handling a pandemic compared to just about anyone, but it's not our fault, China made this! What does it matter where the virus came from when people are dying left and right from it? Now that things are calmer, we can discuss and investigate.
There is still zero proof on the matter, and i doubt there ever will be ( as if the CCP would admit a lab leak in China caused a pandemic with such proportions and consequences).
> Treating you in emergency now might involve kicking someone else off respiratory support.
This has been my standard reply to the "It's just a flu" concept for some time now.
Aside from all this, it's incredible how difficult it is for people to think about this using all the info available (long onset of symptoms, asymptomatic spread, high % of hospitalizations / intensive care, etc) plus thinking in the long term.
I know the generalized idea is no face masks if you don't have symptoms, but if we all used them it might have a good effect on curving the spread.
Unfortunately, western cultures associate face mask with sickness, and are frowned upon.
> If the masks were useless healthcare workers wouldn't wear them
That's not how that works. The masks are less effective when used outside of a clinical setting, must be changed regularly (pretty much every time you take it off), and may prevent the transfer of disease from an infected healthcare worker to an otherwise vulnerable person.
Just because they're not effective for one situation doesn't mean all the advice is moot
They were, however, saying you don't need to wear it if you don't have symptoms, despite clear evidence of asymptomatic transmission.
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