[gmanley]

I'm still surprised there is so much misinformation about this. There are two categories of masks. The first category only prevent you from spreading the disease. These include paper surgical masks, cloth masks and those blue disposable paper masks. These are only made to prevent you from spreading droplets in the air from your moth and nose. If someone with covid isn't wearing a mask this category won't do anything prevent you from catching it.

The second category are masks such as N95, P95, N99, P100, etc. Things like disposable painter masks or reusable masks with replaceable filters. These are meant to filter out particulate in the air and they do reduce the likelihood of you getting the disease. To call your mask P95 it must be certified by NIOSH and tested to meet the given rating, ie P95 must filter out 95 percent of particulate and be resistant to oil.

In the beginning the US and CDC were not recommending using masks. I believe the main reason for this was, not that they didn't believe it was effective, but that they were worried about a shortage for health care professionals.

[BurningFrog]

> I believe the main reason for this was, not that they didn't believe it was effective, but that they were worried about a shortage for health care professionals.

Yeah, but instead of saying that they lied and said masks don't work.

I wonder how much of the current anti-mask sentiments arise from these lies.

[zucker42]

Which person lied? I did not hear the claim (from a public health authority) that masks were not effective in preventing transmission. I did hear the claim that we are unsure if masks provide protection for the user (rather than just protecting others from the user), which still reflects our current knowledge for most mask types AFAIK. I did hear the recommendation against buying masks early on to protect the supplies for more critical users.

I also don't see how you can blame the health authorities for this when half the political leadership in this country continually questioned (and in some cases still questions) the efficacy of masks and successfully politicized the issue.

Scott Alexander covers your point under this blog post https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t.... I believe at one point he felt similarly to you.

[BurningFrog]

Here is the surgeon general saying it: https://www.foxnews.com/media/surgeon-general-explains-masks...

>“What the World Health Organization [WHO] and the CDC [The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] have reaffirmed in the last few days is that they do not recommend the general public wear masks.”

A quick googling also produced this, from a site I've never heard of, but it naches my memory of the time: https://techstartups.com/2020/06/17/dr-fauci-admits-health-e...

[zucker42]

But in neither of those cases did anyone say, you shouldn't wear a mask because they won't work. They recommended against wearing masks because they thought the harms of people wearing masks would outweigh the benefits at that point. I tried to make the distinction between saying "we not do not recommend the public wear masks" and "masks do not help prevent sick people from spreading the virus" clear in my original comment. All comments I saw were the former statement, which I think is not misleading the public or lying, not the latter.

It's possible they were wrong w.r.t. the harms outweighing the benefits but that's easier to say in hindsight.

[austhrow743]

https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...

"They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus" reads to me exactly as "you shouldn't wear a mask because they won't work".

[d1zzy]

Exactly, and at that time my wife and I were wearing masks (that we already had from before the pandemic!) going in stores and people gave us looks, made comments, etc. That is what happens when our leaders are irresponsible, ineffective and plain stupid.

[zucker42]

Thanks!

[DanBC]

> Yeah, but instead of saying that they lied and said masks don't work.

That's not a lie, it's fact.

It's really easy for you to prove it's a lie: post a link to your best quality evidence that shows masks work.

[imtringued]

They reduce transmission. That's how they work.

[Eldt]

Are you suggesting masks don't work? Are you making a general statement or specifically talking about SARS-CoV-2?

[dhimes]

Not really, at least not Fauci. What he said was they wouldn't work for most Americans. What he was implying is that most Americans wouldn't bother to learn to wear them properly.

I think he was right. If your glasses are fogging, RainX isn't your answer. Make the damn mask fit better.

[renewiltord]

Anthony Fauci quoted below with his primary motivations:

"I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs and masks for the health providers who are putting themselves in harm's way every day to take care of sick people," Fauci told O'Donnell.

"When it became clear that we could get the infection could be spread by asymptomatic carriers who don't know they're infected, that made it very clear that we had to strongly recommend masks," he said.

"And also, it soon became clear that we had enough protective equipment and that cloth masks and homemade masks were as good as masks that you would buy from surgical supply stores," Fauci added. "So in the context of when we were not strongly recommending it, it was the correct thing."

[d1zzy]

But a leader speaking out to the population is not the same thing as an engineer/researcher formulating a theory and correcting themselves as information comes through in their research notes. One of the important things you have to consider as a leader is political capital, which is a limited resource. Every time you tell people that they should do something that is different from what they wanted to do, you are burning that capital. You cannot change your mind "as new information comes through" every day, soon enough, everyone stops trusting whatever you say and are back to doing whatever they think is best.

So if you think masks _can_ help (now or in the future, with training, used correctly, when we have enough of them in the future, etc etc) then DO NOT say they do not help and then come back to that because you have "new information".

If the problem was sourcing PPEs for health professionals why didn't the government use emergency powers to seize shipments and ban selling of such critical products to the general population? At least temporarily while building stocks for health professionals (which I'm surprised we didn't already have stocks of, you know, that seems like normal preparation procedure for a national health emergency?)

[dhimes]

Yes- he's negotiating a difficult position. At the time there was a big concern that people wouldn't wear the masks properly. "It takes training" was the implication.

[DanBC]

Combined with a lack of evidence that masks work, and some evidence that masks don't work.

[dhimes]

I think the evidence is that people don't wear masks properly- so in that sense they don't work.

And that's what Fauci was indicating at the beginning.

[icelancer]

>> In the beginning the US and CDC were not recommending using masks. I believe the main reason for this was, not that they didn't believe it was effective, but that they were worried about a shortage for health care professionals.

This happened anyway. Telling noble lies to the population just increases populism and makes people distrust the government even more. Which is paying off wonderfully right about now.

[coryfklein]

> this category won't do anything prevent you from catching it.

Are you saying there have been studies showing approximately 0% reduced risk of infection from wearing a paper or cloth mask?

I'd have assumed that these masks are much less effective than an N95, but I haven't seen any data showing they have no effect.

[zucker42]

There are no studies that I know of that show that cloth masks provide protection for the wearer. The consensus now seems to be that they are effective at decreasing the likelihood that a sick person spreads it to a healthy person if sick people wear them.

Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/31/ssc-journal-club-macin...

[coryfklein]

Absence of evidence something something something

[bearjaws]

And there was a real shortage, several health systems that I work with had their staff reusing the "blue paper" masks for several days at a time.

[space_fountain]

In addition to what other commenters are saying just like vaccines masks only really work on a population level and even there they don't work as well as vaccines. The figures I've seen claim something in the range of a 20 to 40 percent reduction in risk of catching from an infectious person. That isn't anything like what I'd call protection