More important would be fixing the messaging on masks and protection. (Most laymen aren't going to distinguish between droplet, aerosol, airborne, etc. and won't adjust behavior and risk profiles accordingly.)
The CDC told people that masks were not important at the start of the pandemic, largely as a means of reserving stock for doctors and first responders. They then performed an uneven and awkwardly stilted 180 on that message. This massively backfired and led to wide scale public distrust of the public health apparatus. The birth of the anti-mask movement, etc.
We'll be living with the ramifications for a long time.
To effectively combat unseen dangers, we need visible, tangible reminders. Whether masks filtered out the virus or not was not the point at all. In fact, in early 2020 people were told not to mask. That doesn’t mean masks didn’t play an important role in controlling behavior during the pandemic. I think the strategy to force masking is an extremely effective short term strategy to modify behavior. However it is clear now that the population will only tolerate this for short periods. Compliance is more difficult when you can’t tell the population the truth. If you tell them masks don’t help directly but indirectly people won’t wear them at all. If you tell them they work 99% then some will rightly cry conspiracy and resist, while others will begrudgingly comply. CDC burned this strategy by overplaying it and not lifting the mandates sooner. This means people will be less likely to comply with mask mandates in the future.
One of the big problems is that early in the Pandemic, the WHO, Fauci and most media said that Masks were useless. This was repeated several times. The turn-around occurred later and nobody apologised for their earlier, incorrect stances.
There will be lasting consequences of that lie for the rest of the pandemic probably for decades to come. There is a sizeable anti mask movement that gained significant ground because authorities told people masks didn't work despite the science saying the opposite, they even fabricated it as a scientific position further hurting belief in science itself.
Many governments of the world created an anti vaxxer like movement around masks just to protect supplies. They had to do so because they failed to act early enough and to follow their own recommendations for stockpiles of protective equipment. The consequences of those lies will be here for a long time.
Yes, it was the one most prominent mistake in dealing with the pandemic, that there was no clear statement in favor of masks at the beginning. Only partially justifiable by the justified fear, that there would not be enough masks for medical personal.
All the involved should be harshly critisized for that.
However this should not be taken as an excuse to deny all good scientific information we have received and the right measures that have been recommended, especially the overly late committment to masks.
That first advice about masks, when every expert expected them to work was a bit damning but not all of the problem.
Have you noticed that the public still doesn't know that surface cleaning isn't relevant? Or that masks on open spaces were deemed essential until the policy just shifted to agree with the public actions, without the gained expertise being used at all? (They are useful in crowds, and useless outside of one.) Or that ventilation is essential in closed spaces?
But it didn't stop on that. There was just no useful communication of how crowd immunity worked, just some shit from the crazy "let's kill people" ones, and how it related to vaccines. The result is that the public was surprised by it going down when it did, and in a larger way by the shape of the omicron spread.
And on the subject of vaccines, there was no communication at all about the safety of them... what is unsettling, because they are safe to a nearly absurd level (all the ones used on the West, including the one that got suspended everywhere due to unexpected risks.)
Overall, if we had the same pandemic again, the public would be none the wise on how to protect themselves, or what expect from it. No information reaches the people, ever.
Masks are less important, if people socially distance and practice good hygiene.
If you don't give the virus a chance to spread, it cannot spread.
The problem is that in the US and elsewhere, people cannot seem to follow the social distancing and hygiene, so you need to find a way to physically distance people with masks and other protections.
To say that masks do not work, is untrue. There is a reason why doctors and others wear masks in their own professions.
By the way, when you say it is disappearing, that doesn't mean let the guard down. Look at what is happening in Vietnam. 100 days clean and they let their guard down and look at what is happening now.
Funny then how for the first few months of the pandemic the emphasis and public guidance was on desinfecting hands and surfaces and endless debates about how if masks actually help.
Remember that in the beginning there was an enormous shortfall of the masks that were known to be effective in preventing respiratory disease. The CDC (and others) were very worried about medical personnel not being able to get them, very justifiably in hindsight. Just imagine how much worse the (already bad) panic buying of masks would have made it if the CDC had told everyone to mask up.
We absolutely did not know that cloth masks would help. We (incorrectly) thought that anything less than a N95 mask would not help at all, and so that is what was communicated. Since then we have done a lot of science and have learned that while N95 masks are a lot better than, say, double-layered cloth masks, the latter are still much better than nothing in slowing down infection rates.
We also were very focused on the effects for the wearer of masks. We were not focused on the effects of a possible spreader wearing the masks. Part of this was that all of the previous pandemics had diseases that people were symptomatic when they spread the disease. With Covid-19 we have a disease the mostly spreads when people are a-symptomatic. So the potential spreaders are the ones who most need to be wearing masks, and since we can't tell them apart, we need everyone in masks.
All of these things are things we learned along the way. Harping on the CDC (or others) for not knowing them is just wrong. For some of the references here please see:
When I go for a walk outside I wear a mask, because I have seasonal allergies and tree pollen is high here in Massachusetts.
I've been vaccinated, (just got my second shot, so two weeks to go...), but I'll be wearing a mask indoors for probably the next year or so. Unless we start doing things like verifying vaccination or tests for entry to indoor public venues, it's the only thing that makes sense to keep my family safe.
I hate that wearing a mask became politicized. My own opinion is that the reason it did was that the government knowingly decided to lie about the efficacy of wearing a mask in the early days of the pandemic in the U.S. The reason for the lie was because there was insufficient supply of masks, and they didn't trust the public not to buy them off the shelves (which happened anyway), or panic (people got angry and polarized instead).
The CDC and the government agencies communicating policy were not in the business of getting the truth out so people could take sensible precautions. They focused on control and tactical preservation of opinion and the election couldn't have come at a worse time. That focus on control became obvious and they lost the public trust. Everything else spun out on social media with people taking sides instead of talking evidence.
A huge component of that was outright lies from the CDC in the beginning. "No one needs a mask" "They might even be harmful" "they require special training" all of which directly contradicted studies they had funded and published from doing contract tracing with SARS, while simultaneously stating they were essential for healthcare workers. All instead of saying "hey look we have a shortage of masks due to some previous mistakes we made which make us look incompetent now, and our healthcare workers need them more."
Public health management 101 in any textbook will tell you that maintaining public trust during an epidemic is THE most important thing they could do.
Don't blame the people that were paying attention and realized they were full of it. I bought my masks in January because it was clear this was coming. They also silenced any debate about the costs/benefits of various mitigations. Don't even get me started on that one. With an R0 as high as it was, even in the beginning, it was clear to me that even with mitigations you were going to see cases surge beyond hospital capacities. (Bringing the R0 down from 4 to 2.1 would have been a great success, and yet... not that effective in a lot of ways.) Flattening the curve also prolongs the pandemic and deaths of despair were inevitable. This made some sense in the beginning to try and stall for time with the vaccine, but must be weighed against the costs, and there was no reasonable discussion of that at the policy level.
> When news of a mysterious viral pneumonia linked to a market in Wuhan, China, reached the outside world in early January, one of my first reactions was to order a modest supply of masks. Just a few weeks later, there wasn’t a mask to be bought in stores, or online for a reasonable price — just widespread price gouging. Many health experts, no doubt motivated by the sensible and urgent aim of preserving the remaining masks for health care workers, started telling people that they didn’t need masks or that they wouldn’t know how to wear them.
Climate, social change, technology, development, covid response etc..
Best example: Masks.
Do they help?
Probably somewhat, but possibly not. There was the very real concern overall that masks might give people a sense of confidence. Any 'reduction in hand-washing' would offset mask usage.
In the early stages, the plan was to not create 100x demand for masks (I mean, there was going to be 10x no matter what) by suppressing public need for them, so as to get the PPE to medical workers. (Not sure if that was the right move, but there's logic in it.)
Once the mask-making gears are moving into production, then the new perspective means 'masks can become more of a requirement for regular people'. So the equilibrium shifts, and then, 'as a whole, we should wear masks'. i.e. a 'new truth' to be propagated.
To any regular person sitting on the sidelines, it has to be confusing, and we should forgive people for being cynical that the press was screaming from day one 'don't use masks, you're not responsible enough and they need to go to doctors, they are in desperate short supply' to a few weeks later: 'wear a mask or you are an inconsiderate redneck'.
So 'new realities, create new 'truths'' in a way.
Even more nuanced 'truthiness':
Right now on CNN you see these graphs of COVID 'spiking' again in America --> 'scary'.
But - when you look at the graph of deaths it tells a completely different story. Mostly, it's still going down with a little bump recently.
Have a look [1]
The 'more complicated truth' is that the US has been expanding testing a lot, and possibly different kinds of people are getting infected (younger?), more people are taking it, and the rate fatality is dropping.
So what is the 'truth' there? Can we blame CNN for showing a chart every day, when technically speaking its 'factual'? But in reality it doesn't really tell the whole story at all and is potentially misleading? Or what about the responsibility of mass media to err on the side of being conservative (small 'c') so as to promote positive behaviour, in that people need to 'feel' the pandemic is material, or they won't wear masks.
For those people with the intelligence, means, education and wherewithal, ok, it's possible to 'sift through' the headlines, but most aren't in a position to do that, they have 'real jobs, real lives, diapers to change' and so the 'truth' is always going to be in flux.
Priorities. It's great to say everyone should use masks, they do help somewhat even if they're not perfect, but supply was too limited. It's getting better, but health-care professionals are still having to wear PPE too long or reuse it or go without. They're terrified, and not without reason; a lot of them have already been infected. We need to prioritize getting enough masks to them, then to other vulnerable people, and finally to the general populace.
Compare it to a different kind of mask in a different kind of war - the kind that one would use to protect against chemical-warfare agents. Or doses of antidote. Sure, everyone would be safer if they had these things, but if there are fewer of them than there are people then by what reasoning should they not go first to those on the front lines? It's a simple effect-maximization problem, with a solution that benefits even those who don't get the gear.
We need people to keep wearing masks until there is herd immunity for the simple facts that a) you can't tell who is vaccinated or not by sight, and b) social pressure to wear them in public will collapse if X% of people stop wearing them.
This issue needs thorough investigative work, to reconstruct an objective timeline.
But as far as I remember it, mask wearing was seen first as being something for paranoid conspiracy theorists, then selfish people, then the narrative was reversed.
Experts were invited on primetime TV to say masks are not recommended to the general public.
I distinctly remember arguing with educated people at work, online, with relatives, that masks should be worn in enclosed public places, months deep into the pandemic.
We would see old people, barely managing to walk, not wear masks while going grocery shopping, because government experts told them they didn't need to. All the while China was in total lockdown and victim counts exploding.
I fear most people would prefer to forget because they played a part in it and it makes them feel dumb. We might get collective amnesia, ensuring this part of the story never reaches the history books. We shouldn't be ashamed though, we've all been victims of misinformation and cultish behavior at one point, the important thing is to draw lessons from it.
Great, let's wait for these better understanding anti-maskers to self-educate themselves about infectious diseases to the level of our health officials and THEN we'll begin to implement important social controls during a global pandemic.
This, 100% this. #1 is so easy that it hurts be that this isn't headline news. The CDC fucked up big time telling people masks don't help. Even if you don't have access to a surgical mask there are resources out there for how to make cloth masks or even use a T-shirt as a mask. This should be table stakes. Yes, you are going to get weird looks (I already have) but if it encourages even 1 more person to feel comfortable then it's worth it to me.
#2-4 are largely out of our hands (as individual citizens) but #1 we can all start doing TODAY.
inb4: I'm not interested in arguments about "false senses of security" (we already have people thinking that without masks) or that "they won't fit the mask correctly"/"wear it incorrectly" (you are letting good be the enemy of great and we just don't have time to get to "great").
Please reduce your contacts and if you have to go out wear a mask!
The CDC told people that masks were not important at the start of the pandemic, largely as a means of reserving stock for doctors and first responders. They then performed an uneven and awkwardly stilted 180 on that message. This massively backfired and led to wide scale public distrust of the public health apparatus. The birth of the anti-mask movement, etc.
We'll be living with the ramifications for a long time.
You shouldn't lie to the public.
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