[smallnamespace]

I think the easy answer here is that there’s no culture of wearing masks in public and it’s very visible and easy to ridicule.

This isn’t Tokyo, where everyone was wearing masks before this crisis and you get one for 400 yen at any convenience store, even inside the rail station.

Authorities in a democracy work mainly by persuasion, and they have a limited budget of how much they can educate and bend people’s behavior. This is what you would expect a system that takes citizen feedback into account, where citizens have a very strong prior that is inappropriate to the current situation.

Note most people in a democracy are strongly against government propaganda, but propaganda is basically state-owned tax on citizens’ attention. Think about how much attention it would take to educate people until they all voluntarily wore masks, whether that education would be politically popular, and also how many dollars in ad revenue that would have cost in the private attention market (ads).

[pas]

Good points, but still, it's not consistent to use that low-bandwidth channel for wrong messages.

Sure, say that don't hoard masks, but don't say that it doesn't work anyway. Say that it would only work if everyone would use them. (Because you don't know when you are contagious anyway, so saying only sick folks should wear them is again a bad message.)

Also, saying that everyone should wear them is consistent with don't hoard them. (After all, if doesn't help you if you have masks but don't distribute them to others to protect you and "your loved ones".)