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.
I distinctly recall a virologist on public television early in the pandemic saying the hands and surface disinfection rituals were for psychology. He was not recommending masks either because there weren't enough to go around for everyone.
The debates about masks in the west, even after production ramped up, were a consequence of the initial confusing messages from officials. I've never seen it debated in Asia where they had masks available from the start.
As a resident of Asia I can tell you that people were wearing masks in late-January 2020, as soon as the outbreak was apparent in Wuhan.
This wasn't the first rodeo for SE Asia, scars of past pandemics has made the response here much more automatic, orderly and effective.
I think also supplies of masks etc were much more robust here because they were already worn in daily life due to pollution, normal sickness, etc and a massive medical tourism industry that was about to be shutdown and have their supplies made available.
I'm not sure that is correct. In a subsequently FOIA'd email, Fauci told a colleague on February 5, 2020.
> Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.
That's a well known fact about how masks work in general, yes. They have a large effect on transmission from the wearer and a comparatively small effect in preventing transmission to the wearer.
However, when you have a limited supply of masks, it's impossible to give them out to every potentially-infected person, so saving them for high-risk people (like healthcare professionals, who also have the highest risk of becoming infected themselves) is still rational.
Only with droplet spread. Once we're in the realm of aerosol spread, as with SARS-CoV-2, you need N95 filters or better to stop them. The virus just goes around or through the cloth masks everyone was wearing.
It wasn't disinformation. It was no secret that one of the reasons masks weren't recommended for general public use was that hospitals and clinics should be supplied as a priority.
If you got a different impression than this message, blame wherever you get your news from.
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
It's hard to get more direct than that. It wasn't just about preserving supply for healthcare workers, high-level government officials were explicitly stating that masks were not effective for the general public.
Fortunately we have archives of all this stuff, as many statements (like this one) were later deleted.
You will also note that in the early pandemic, it was completely unclear that non-N95 masks, such as surgical masks (let alone cotton masks) would have a positive benefit. That changed later on, of course.
That statement reflected the best information available at the time, but it was designed to be as simple and actionable as possible, not to communicate highly-technical nuance.
Seriously. I can find social media posts of friends in April of 2020 sewing cloth masks to donate to hospitals/medical clinics to help them backfill their mask shortages.
Yes, we used to think non-N95 masks (let alone cotton masks) wouldn't help, and then when we got more data to the contrary, we had to update this belief. That's unfortunate, but normal.
The communication at the beginning was that it was only spread through respiratory droplets, so therefore the combination of social distancing and cloth/surgical masks would be sufficient.
Airborne/aerosol transmission was only acknowledged by the WHO and CDC in May of 2021, over a year after the pandemic was declared. And taking that long to acknowledge it makes me think it wasn't just a strategic lie to preserve the supply of respirators for medical staff.
That was debunked here on HN right from the start though. And this is hardly a specialist medical community. I think the parent is right in asserting that the medical community knew this all along. Probably they didn't know for absolute certain, but it was considered highly likely. And that then got spun into a confusing message by the media. The WHO and the CDC were useless, but plenty of medical bodies around the world did much better than them.
CDC updated its site in Oct 2020 to acknowledge airborne spread. There is still something of an argument in the scientific/medical community about what "airborne" means. A lot of folks lived through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires... which is scary because if there's just another infected person in the building, they can infect people far away!
and when the initial scientific articles about COVID air spreading (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article) came out, many policy makers were truly terrified of making announcements that would cause worldwide panic.
The new coronavirus is likely spreading through the air to some degree, the top U.S. infectious disease official said on Friday, one day after the World Health Organization urged further studies on the ways the virus is transmitted.
“Still some question about aerosol but likely some degree of aerosol,” Anthony Fauci, the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said by video during a panel session at a COVID-19 conference organized by the International AIDS Society.
Fauci on Thursday had said it was a “reasonable assumption” that airborne transmission was occurring even though there was not a lot of solid evidence behind it. The WHO urged more studies on the issue.
