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I don't think the CDC/WHO recommendations started as a noble lie, just as a medical/bureaucratic orthodoxy, consistently expressed before any shortage. The orthodoxy drew too sharp a distinction between airborne and droplet modes of transmission, it didn't anticipate the possibly extensive asymptomatic spread of this new virus, and it tried, given the low bandwidth of public health messaging in the old days, to speak simply and authoritartively in favor of the interventions with the strongest evidence for the largest effects. Even to healthcare workers, the emphasis in the setting of something like flu was on handwashing. Masks in clinic went on coughing patients, not us. For a public less consistently exposed, the number needed to mask to prevent a single infection was judged too low to bother. Masks in Asia were seen as public health theater, like spraying fog machines in the streets. And maybe most dangerously, most complicating a reversal, expressing an understanding of this mildly counterintuitive finding - covering faces doesn't stop respiratory viruses - was taken as a mark of scientificness. (And remember, it's still largely true, the effect is probably fairly small, N95 or cloth mask no matter. The virus spread well in places with mask-wearing, and dampened more quickly there for reasons other than masks.) The CDC/WHO people are under pressure to change deeply held and strongly stated beliefs in public, and then to live with the implication that their confident error cost lives. Relative to that, communicating that we should wear masks, but leave the respirators for medical workers, is easy peasy. For fun background on the orthodoxy, including a case where a single flu patient infected dozens of people on a plane in the 70s without managing to persuade people of some meaningful amount of airborne/fine aerosol spread:
https://twitter.com/rkhamsi/status/1244659064350670848?s=19 |