There was a lot of stuff like that during the first month or two, not only in the US. Downplaying the importance of masks was widespread during the first months, when in a lot of places, masking up for most people meant pulling a knitted shawl up above your nose. Remember, that was the time when people stockpiled toilet paper and hand soap, and also a time when there was still a ton of speculation about what we were dealing with and how to best handle it. It wouldn't surprise me if some governments deliberately downplayed the role of proper masks in the prevention of aerosol formation just to cover up their own failure to secure essential medical supplies.
Terrible supply chain, or incredible supply chain that is 100% based on just -on-time and forecasting, and has no flexibility?
Covid has shown that the current way of things is so fucking fragile that chunks of the world economy start to go crazy from a boat going sideways. We are basically 3 days from collapse all the time.
It's not exactly misleading if you don't know you are wrong yourself. There were a number of things which they got wrong early on, like the fomite thing. Fomites were big, until they found out they were not very important for spreading the virus at all.
It is misleading to spread the impression that "there's no reason to think masks work" for an extremely contagious respiratory virus a la SARS.
These people are not idiots. This is respiratory disease 101 and the obvious PSA to provide us "wear a mask until we know what's going on, ideally N95".
They were likely spreading this disinformation because of PPE shortages.
Because they don't have that power. They can only give public health guidance and do studies.
Feds were already buying up PPE / diverting it internationally from people who had already purchased it and were going with a denial strategy. Doctors and nurses were coming up with elaborate protocols for reusing PPE because they didn't have enough.
Because they don’t have that power. They can only give public health guidance and do studies.
They don't have the power to make it happen but they have the power to request it. And, like, there is no reason why it wouldn't be done if they couldn't do it any other way. Masks weren't the only thing they were wrong about early on.
They don’t have the power to make it happen but they have the power to request it.
I'm starting to think you're just pointlessly contrarian.
Your point is incorrect. They don't have the power to do what you want them to. They are clearly not gadflies against existing power structures either, so a public request cannot be expected. It would be absurd to assume there weren't internal requests for more PPE, that was official policy early on like I already mentioned.
Please stop playing armchair expert about topics you clearly do not understand.
And, like, there is no reason why it wouldn’t be done if they couldn’t do it any other way.
Why can't it do more like?
This is vague to the point of meaningless.
Masks weren’t the only thing they were wrong about early on.
That was the big one.
I see in your comment history talking about fomites as an example of this. Again, we're talking about preliminary public health guidance regarding an extremely contagious respiratory, the etiology of which was still being nailed down. Tentative caution is the obvious call. "Wash stuff until we know more" is 100% correct advice, not getting it wrong. "Who knows abouy masks they might not even work" is erring on the side of danger for, again, a highly contagious respiratory virus.
Your point is incorrect. They don’t have the power to do what you want them to. They are clearly not gadflies against existing power structures either, so a public request cannot be expected.
What does this have to do with anything, it's not some incredibly unrealistic request to ask for rationing of PPE.
It would be absurd to assume there weren’t internal requests for more PPE, that was official policy early on like I already mentioned.
Yes, there were, and as you said, they more or less followed through, so in the case where they were afraid there wouldn't be enough PPE for healthcare personnel, why would they not just say that and still do more or less the same thing they did regardless, plus expect some rationing? Rationing PPE so that healthcare personnel has enough isn't some power structure shattering request, neither is it unrealistic. If they were absolutely certain masks would help, there is no good reason why they wouldn't just say "we need lots of masks for everyone ASAP and rationing until that is feasible". Asking for lockdowns for months is much harder. The mask thing is nothing compared to that.
Like, I don't question that they were aware what they said may not have been correct, but I wouldn't assume they were certain of it, there doesn't seem to be a good enough reason to do that.
I don't think you understand just how many hundreds of thousands of worthless bureaucrats are employed in this shitty fucking country.
In order to state on the record that they need to reuse masks and perform rationing they would have to go on record as saying it's ok to sometimes violate all of their pointless removed redundant policies and it would completely undermine all faith in healthcare in America and hospital administration in general... which ended up happening anyway, obviously. But it would have caused a massive bureaucratic crisis and nobody knew how long this was going to go on for, at least at the time. Nobody wanted to be left holding the bag, and have been the one who over reacted and cost corporate hospital chains hundreds of billions of dollars.
Look at any jokes about the joint commission or JCAHO for examples.
They were boxed in and had to make a decision so they chose the absolute worst possible option. They waited as long as they possibly could, which of course just made everything worse.
It's been a real fucking trip to see all these people who are just now losing faith in the CDC. I was in Dallas for the ebola crisis and if the CDC had been in charge of that, which is to say, if we had waited for them to take leadership, we'd all be fucking dead right now. That organization...hell, this country, was gutted decades ago. There's nobody steering this ship.
There is no leadership, no governance, in American government. This sounds like doomposting but I'm completely serious.. The corporations have taken over. All is lost.
What does this have to do with anything, it’s not some incredibly unrealistic request to ask for rationing of PPE.
You're still confused about their role. One I already explained. Stop treating your imagination like it's a fact-generating machine.
This will likely be my last reply to you in this thread. I'm not interested in teasing apart terminal Redditor brain where making stuff up on the fly and deflection are considered the right way to have a disagreement.
Yes, there were, and as you said, they more or less followed through, so in the case where they were afraid there wouldn’t be enough PPE for healthcare personnel
To be clear, there wasn't enough and health officials were worried.
why would they not just say that
Because the capacity in which they're "saying" anything in this context is via public health announcements, not telling WaPo what the president should do.
You're getting very confused about who "they" are as if there's a coherent unit tasked with constructing healthcare policy and public health messaging. There is not.
Rationing PPE so that healthcare personnel has enough isn’t some power structure shattering request, neither is it unrealistic.
They don't have the power to institute that policy at all. It would all be internal. They instead used what power they do have: messaging.
If they were absolutely certain masks would help
That is obviously not a premise of our conversation and I have explained why twice.
Asking for lockdowns for months is much harder.
That was already a WHO recommendation and the US never actually recommended the real deal on lockdowns to begin with. The messaging there was watered down into "flatten the curve", remember?
Like, I don’t question that they were aware what they said may not have been correct, but I wouldn’t assume they were certain of it, there doesn’t seem to be a good enough reason to do that.
It was obvious FUD with the obvious contradiction, even from Fauci himself, that healthcare workers needed masks.
Getting the early stages of a pandemic response right is insanely important, and they continued to back the droplet theory after they started recommending the use of masks
The CDC was wrong about masks during the start of the pandemic because pretty much the entire world was and they weren't sure how to deal with the novel virus. What I don't understand is how it follows that they're definitely wrong about everything. And, like, it wasn't a couple of weeks ago, it's been months since they started recommending masks worldwide.
The thing is, using Google I had also found tons of research which said masks didn't make much of a difference, because with many diseases which were spread largely via fomites, including many types fo flu, people used masks improperly and it ended up even making it worse in some cases. In some other cases some research showed that there is a benefit but it isn't that significant. Like, yeah, it's not hard to find that sort of research via Google, but it's not hard to find research saying the opposite either. That is the issue, there was conflicting research, there were misunderstandings about how the virus spreads, and there was also a big misunderstanding that was uncovered, which is that droplets larger than previously thought so could stay in the air for very long, since previously they had decided on a threshold which turned out to be wrong, and it had persisted so long because there weren't many physicists working on that sort of stuff to tell the doctors they were wrong. Lockdowns and distancing on the contrary are what I would never expect anyone to say they didn't know were effective.
Then why were they saving masks for healthcare workers?
Healthcare workers wear masks regardless. The argument was never that no kind of mask would ever help at all in any case, it was that the benefit wasn't that serious at that point since ostensibly people wouldn't use them properly, they wouldn't be N95 masks so not as effective, they would mostly only prevent people from giving it to others and not from not contracting it themselves, that they would give people a false sense of security, and that healthcare workers work in an environment where there are tons of aerosols being produced. I remember all that sort of stuff going around, and the central point seemed to be "we should save them for the healthcare workers".
Like, if they knew it would make a big difference, they could have just asked governments to ration them for the time being.
Can you post some of these studies and meta studies that show the masks weren’t effective at preventing SARS infections? I posted some.
Yes, but not now because I'm on mobile. I remember reading them because I remember many articles back then citing them.
I mean yeah I've noticed it tons, there was a point where many people were doom posting about vaccines being dangerous, or being ineffective, or impossible to supply, etc. Then there was another wave which was about how the mutations that surfaced had surely rendered them useless. None of these things happened. Unless something nasty happens in India now, it doesn't seem like there will be a big surge again this year either in the US or Europe or even most of LatAm and many places have returned to semi-normalcy already. It's like people really want to believe it's gonna last forever.
They told people masks were unnecessary when covid got to the US, which contributed significantly to the early spread
That was like the first month of the pandemic.
There was a lot of stuff like that during the first month or two, not only in the US. Downplaying the importance of masks was widespread during the first months, when in a lot of places, masking up for most people meant pulling a knitted shawl up above your nose. Remember, that was the time when people stockpiled toilet paper and hand soap, and also a time when there was still a ton of speculation about what we were dealing with and how to best handle it. It wouldn't surprise me if some governments deliberately downplayed the role of proper masks in the prevention of aerosol formation just to cover up their own failure to secure essential medical supplies.
That's exactly the motive: PPE supplies were limited so they ran a public health disinformation campaign.
And now the CDC is spreading another recommendation contrary to the most basic public health policy analysis.
deleted by creator
Terrible supply chain, or incredible supply chain that is 100% based on just -on-time and forecasting, and has no flexibility?
Covid has shown that the current way of things is so fucking fragile that chunks of the world economy start to go crazy from a boat going sideways. We are basically 3 days from collapse all the time.
deleted by creator
It's all about a good quarter, never about long-term access.
And it bred skepticism of public health authorities - who were absolutely misleading the public during a global pandemic.
It's not exactly misleading if you don't know you are wrong yourself. There were a number of things which they got wrong early on, like the fomite thing. Fomites were big, until they found out they were not very important for spreading the virus at all.
It is misleading to spread the impression that "there's no reason to think masks work" for an extremely contagious respiratory virus a la SARS.
These people are not idiots. This is respiratory disease 101 and the obvious PSA to provide us "wear a mask until we know what's going on, ideally N95".
They were likely spreading this disinformation because of PPE shortages.
Again, if they were spreading it because of PPE shortages, why couldn't they just say "we need to ration PPE" and leave it at that?
Because they don't have that power. They can only give public health guidance and do studies.
Feds were already buying up PPE / diverting it internationally from people who had already purchased it and were going with a denial strategy. Doctors and nurses were coming up with elaborate protocols for reusing PPE because they didn't have enough.
They don't have the power to make it happen but they have the power to request it. And, like, there is no reason why it wouldn't be done if they couldn't do it any other way. Masks weren't the only thing they were wrong about early on.
I'm starting to think you're just pointlessly contrarian.
Your point is incorrect. They don't have the power to do what you want them to. They are clearly not gadflies against existing power structures either, so a public request cannot be expected. It would be absurd to assume there weren't internal requests for more PPE, that was official policy early on like I already mentioned.
Please stop playing armchair expert about topics you clearly do not understand.
Why can't it do more like?
This is vague to the point of meaningless.
That was the big one.
I see in your comment history talking about fomites as an example of this. Again, we're talking about preliminary public health guidance regarding an extremely contagious respiratory, the etiology of which was still being nailed down. Tentative caution is the obvious call. "Wash stuff until we know more" is 100% correct advice, not getting it wrong. "Who knows abouy masks they might not even work" is erring on the side of danger for, again, a highly contagious respiratory virus.
What does this have to do with anything, it's not some incredibly unrealistic request to ask for rationing of PPE.
Yes, there were, and as you said, they more or less followed through, so in the case where they were afraid there wouldn't be enough PPE for healthcare personnel, why would they not just say that and still do more or less the same thing they did regardless, plus expect some rationing? Rationing PPE so that healthcare personnel has enough isn't some power structure shattering request, neither is it unrealistic. If they were absolutely certain masks would help, there is no good reason why they wouldn't just say "we need lots of masks for everyone ASAP and rationing until that is feasible". Asking for lockdowns for months is much harder. The mask thing is nothing compared to that.
Like, I don't question that they were aware what they said may not have been correct, but I wouldn't assume they were certain of it, there doesn't seem to be a good enough reason to do that.
I don't think you understand just how many hundreds of thousands of worthless bureaucrats are employed in this shitty fucking country.
In order to state on the record that they need to reuse masks and perform rationing they would have to go on record as saying it's ok to sometimes violate all of their pointless removed redundant policies and it would completely undermine all faith in healthcare in America and hospital administration in general... which ended up happening anyway, obviously. But it would have caused a massive bureaucratic crisis and nobody knew how long this was going to go on for, at least at the time. Nobody wanted to be left holding the bag, and have been the one who over reacted and cost corporate hospital chains hundreds of billions of dollars.
Look at any jokes about the joint commission or JCAHO for examples.
They were boxed in and had to make a decision so they chose the absolute worst possible option. They waited as long as they possibly could, which of course just made everything worse.
It's been a real fucking trip to see all these people who are just now losing faith in the CDC. I was in Dallas for the ebola crisis and if the CDC had been in charge of that, which is to say, if we had waited for them to take leadership, we'd all be fucking dead right now. That organization...hell, this country, was gutted decades ago. There's nobody steering this ship.
There is no leadership, no governance, in American government. This sounds like doomposting but I'm completely serious.. The corporations have taken over. All is lost.
You're still confused about their role. One I already explained. Stop treating your imagination like it's a fact-generating machine.
This will likely be my last reply to you in this thread. I'm not interested in teasing apart terminal Redditor brain where making stuff up on the fly and deflection are considered the right way to have a disagreement.
To be clear, there wasn't enough and health officials were worried.
Because the capacity in which they're "saying" anything in this context is via public health announcements, not telling WaPo what the president should do.
You're getting very confused about who "they" are as if there's a coherent unit tasked with constructing healthcare policy and public health messaging. There is not.
They don't have the power to institute that policy at all. It would all be internal. They instead used what power they do have: messaging.
That is obviously not a premise of our conversation and I have explained why twice.
That was already a WHO recommendation and the US never actually recommended the real deal on lockdowns to begin with. The messaging there was watered down into "flatten the curve", remember?
It was obvious FUD with the obvious contradiction, even from Fauci himself, that healthcare workers needed masks.
Getting the early stages of a pandemic response right is insanely important, and they continued to back the droplet theory after they started recommending the use of masks
deleted by creator
Yes, like more than a year ago. And your post said a couple of weeks ago.
Like why are you just talking about the US, the same thing happened everywhere.
deleted by creator
The CDC was wrong about masks during the start of the pandemic because pretty much the entire world was and they weren't sure how to deal with the novel virus. What I don't understand is how it follows that they're definitely wrong about everything. And, like, it wasn't a couple of weeks ago, it's been months since they started recommending masks worldwide.
deleted by creator
The thing is, using Google I had also found tons of research which said masks didn't make much of a difference, because with many diseases which were spread largely via fomites, including many types fo flu, people used masks improperly and it ended up even making it worse in some cases. In some other cases some research showed that there is a benefit but it isn't that significant. Like, yeah, it's not hard to find that sort of research via Google, but it's not hard to find research saying the opposite either. That is the issue, there was conflicting research, there were misunderstandings about how the virus spreads, and there was also a big misunderstanding that was uncovered, which is that droplets larger than previously thought so could stay in the air for very long, since previously they had decided on a threshold which turned out to be wrong, and it had persisted so long because there weren't many physicists working on that sort of stuff to tell the doctors they were wrong. Lockdowns and distancing on the contrary are what I would never expect anyone to say they didn't know were effective.
deleted by creator
But there were meta studies saying the opposite too, that's the issue. And in some cases, both were true but in different contexts.
deleted by creator
Healthcare workers wear masks regardless. The argument was never that no kind of mask would ever help at all in any case, it was that the benefit wasn't that serious at that point since ostensibly people wouldn't use them properly, they wouldn't be N95 masks so not as effective, they would mostly only prevent people from giving it to others and not from not contracting it themselves, that they would give people a false sense of security, and that healthcare workers work in an environment where there are tons of aerosols being produced. I remember all that sort of stuff going around, and the central point seemed to be "we should save them for the healthcare workers".
Like, if they knew it would make a big difference, they could have just asked governments to ration them for the time being.
Yes, but not now because I'm on mobile. I remember reading them because I remember many articles back then citing them.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I mean yeah I've noticed it tons, there was a point where many people were doom posting about vaccines being dangerous, or being ineffective, or impossible to supply, etc. Then there was another wave which was about how the mutations that surfaced had surely rendered them useless. None of these things happened. Unless something nasty happens in India now, it doesn't seem like there will be a big surge again this year either in the US or Europe or even most of LatAm and many places have returned to semi-normalcy already. It's like people really want to believe it's gonna last forever.