[waterhouse]

Then you were ahead of the WHO, which, according to an article from March 30: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-r...

"(CNN) World Health Organization officials Monday said they still recommend people not wear face masks unless they are sick with Covid-19 or caring for someone who is sick.

"There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday."

Certain institutions seem to use the epistemic standard "if something hasn't been rigorously proven to be a good idea, then you shouldn't do it". It's the kind of logic that, consistently applied, would say you shouldn't use parachutes in skydiving because there haven't been randomized controlled studies establishing their effectiveness. I think this is what incrudible is arguing against.

How did such logic take hold in the first place? My first guess is that it's something like, that's the type of logic that lets them definitively say "you shouldn't take xyz homeopathic remedy" instead of "well, our expert doctor says he doesn't expect it to help but he can't completely rule it out, and there isn't any good evidence that it does work".

[kurthr]

The point is that half of all carriers and many of the superspreaders are "asymptomatic" as far as they are concerned so how would you know if you were sick to protect others or yourself. That article sounded fairly idiotic then and still does now. Would you want your surgeon operating on you without a mask? Why not? Should they wash their hands, if they think they're clean?

This is a recent paper on masks... https://www.cell.com/med/fulltext/S2666-6340(20)30072-6