I don’t notice any erudite contributions from you.
Have states relaxed laws against being masked in public?
Are facial recognition systems fooled by carpenters’ masks?
Will sexy masked influencers turn the tide of US attitudes?
“I have a constitutional right to infect others!” cries the individual forced to take a shot against his will. No, they don’t, especially not with known fatal contagions. And THAT is where respiratory mask-wearing may be mandatory, when 1) the CDC figures required masking will be noticeably effective and 2) an infinite supply of masks is on hand. I foresee facial hair quickly losing popularity. Only bearded sickos will lack masks.
Let’s take two examples. Bob & Janice. Both have covid but are asymptomatic, and feel Ok.
Bob has stayed home for the last two weeks. He works from home, does video conferencing, plays games, drinks Mtn Dew and IPA. Has put on ten pounds. Doesn’t believe in this mask or glove 'crap" . Orders groceries from Amazon or Vons, gets Pizza delivered. “Just in case” he still washes his hands carefully after unpacking orders. Hasn’t been within 20 feet of a live human since contracting Covid and no indirect contact either. How many has Bob infected? ** Zero.**
Janice puts on her gloves and mask whenever she leave her home. She has been shopping four times, goes to work at a small company (where the employees all wear masks), and goes to church on Sunday, even teaches Sunday school- has even made cloth masks for her students and taught them a little prayer to say when washing their hands. If she is around people coughing or looking sick, she changes her gloves and mask. Janice- like just about everyone else- has not taken any courses on how to wear a mask and gloves properly. Janice is sure that her gloves and mask protect her. How many has Janice infected? ** Thousands. **
Now that being said- as i said earlier- if you want to make your own cloth masks and wear them when out in public- more power to you. Cant hurt as long as you understand they are not proof.
DrDeth, one of my Facebook friends summarized today’s press conference Q&A by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker as follows:
Good advice.
Stay home.
If you must go out, then sure, wear a home-made mask. Why not? But dont think wearing a mask or gloves means you can go about freely. Stay home. If what we are saying here is that on your once a week grocery trip for essentials, you wear a mask, then fine.
Dont buy medical grade masks, since that will kill people, since that means medical professional wont have them to wear.
This is just another red herring that gets brought up in the mask debate. We tell people that washing hands helps with infectious diseases but we never worry about people then thinking washing hands makes them invincible and so they’ll go out and rub on a bunch of faces just because they washed their hands. Everyone understands that washing hands adds an imperfect, additional layer of protection that should be layered onto existing protocols.
Nobody has advocated equipping everyone with P100 respirators. All plans for universal masking have relied on a combination of cheap surgical masks and cloth homemade masks. Even the average idiot can understand that these are imperfect tools that can only supplement existing measures.
Every country that’s relied on universal masking has also sent a clear and consistent message that masks are only to be used for essential tasks and that you should always prefer staying home without a mask to going outside with a mask.
Also the stuff about how people aren’t trained in how to properly use a mask. Like, cmon, are you kidding me? The training required to use a surgical mask does not take more than 30 seconds: There’s a clean side and a dirty side. Try not to get anything from the dirty side into your face. Wash your hands before and after you take off the mask so you’re not contaminating your face with the dirty side, then wash your face after you take off the mask.
All of this is just extremely transparent motivated reasoning where you start with the pre-defined answer and you try and find a bunch of bullshit reasons to justify the answer because you can’t say the real reason which is that you wanted to make sure there were enough masks for HCW (which ended up failing anyway).
If you’re going to launch into completely absurd hyperbole, why not say she’s infected millions? Heck, billions! :rolleyes:
Yes, that **is **what I’m saying. We are deathly (literally) afraid of going outside, but when we have to, to get groceries or get a prescription filled, we want that really scary trip to be a little less risky if possible. And we don’t want to have to push through this headwind of “well, we don’t want to let people know how to be safer when out in public because it will just encourage them”. It’s honestly really insulting to have information managed in this way. It’s actually reminiscent of arguments that birth control pills or HPV vaccinations are bad because they incentivize teenage girls to act like whores. Just give me the straight dope on what all interventions can have any impact at all, and we are going to attempt to apply ALL of them to the very infrequent times we leave our home.
And we do have three N95 masks, which we take good care of and reuse, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to feel guilty about buying them. It’s ridiculous to pit people against each other like this. Imagine if we were told not to buy carseats for our kids because People More Important Than You need the carseats to protect their Kids Who Are More Important Than Your Kids. Fuck that.
BTW, I do know how to make a mask seal well, and I’ve taught my wife. This is something I have months of practice at, from making sure my ventilator mask seals properly (the readout on the machine lets me know if it doesn’t, and I can feel the rush of air anyway).
The OP posed a great question and I’ve enjoyed the responses in the thread. Interestingly, I think many of the replies that evince disagreement on the surface (i.e., mask vs. no mask) are not necessarily in conflict if one digs into their premises, scope, and objectives.
The OP asked “why was the American public told not to wear face masks?” I think the most straightforward answer, to which many posters have alluded with good evidence, is that: (1) the CDC wanted to mitigate a potential run on face masks that are desperately needed by medical professionals, and (2) the CDC knows that many would-be mask users will not properly use them and may in fact increase the risk of spreading the virus through improper use. It’s important to recognize that public health advice and individual medical advice are not necessarily the same thing.
In a way, it’s similar to a Nash equilibrium or prisoner’s dilemma. On one hand, it’s arguably best for a rational actor on an individual basis to wear a mask in public (assuming that actor knows how to properly wear/use a mask, to include sanitation. However, if you extrapolate that behavior to a macro level, you exacerbate the shortage of PPE, which leads to more sick doctors and nurses, and hurts us all. Add that the potential risk mitigation of widespread (proper) mask usage can virtually be obtained by social distancing and hand washing, and the cost/benefit analysis quickly favors reserving PPE for doctors and nurses. Again, public health decisions and individual medical (or risk mitigation) decisions are not equivalent; in this case they may run in contrast.
Here in Italy, face masks have become ubiquitous in recent weeks. Some supermarkets won’t let you in without one. I’ve seen very few N95 masks in public but many paper disposable masks and makeshift masks (bandannas, scarves, etc.). The police officer who checked my transit papers this week was wearing one that had been home sewn from what looked like a cotton shirt. He has a high volume of interaction with the public so he probably should have something better, but there aren’t enough to go around.
I also routinely see behavior that undermines the masks’ protection and even increases risk. Many people here smoke cigarettes. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen them frequently pulling their masks aside to smoke (touching their faces in the process). Yesterday I saw a woman leaving the supermarket with a bag of groceries in one gloved hand, the other gloved hand holding a handkerchief directly to her face. I expect Americans would behave similarly. I also expect the CDC took a similar expectation into consideration when it advised against widespread mask usage.
With an increase in public understanding of proper mask usage, perhaps it makes sense to encourage the public to use masks so long as they use them properly and don’t substantially impact the availability of masks for medical professionals.
That’s a mischaracterization of the point. Individuals have a natural right (the Constitution be damned) to decide what he puts into his body.
Mary Mallon (aka Typhoid Mary) unintentionally spread salmonella to dozens of people as an asymptomatic carrier. Several people, perhaps dozens, died as a result of exposure. This was before antibiotic treatments were widely available. Today a round of antibiotics would cure a similar asymptomatic carrier,prevent spread, and save lives.
IMO, it would be right to require someone like her to take those antibiotics and thereby save others’ lives. No individual right is absolute.
Then why does both the CDC and the WHO suggest to not mask? Why is it that the best medical experts in the world say to not mask- or at best- “it* might* help, if everyone does it”?
For the fourth time now- wearing a mask doesnt make you any safer. It makes those around you safer if you have the disease. The fact that you cant understand this is exactly why the medical experts are saying don’t mask.
If** YOU **wear a mask you are not making the trip any safer for YOU, just for others around you if you are sick. Got that?
So that "scary trip " is just as risky unless* everyone *wears masks.
I don’t think the CDC was lying about anything. There’s no need to look for conspiracy theory angles when the simpler truth is plainly obvious: they - were - not - prepared. Full stop.
The CDC and HHS were prepared to do the things that they routinely do, like collecting health data from surveys, studying emergent bacteria strains, studying the efficacy of various cancer treatments, and so forth. The federal government was simply ill-equipped to deal with a global pandemic. It’s as though it didn’t even enter the realm of their consciousness, despite being only 5 years removed from ebola, which was only a few international flights away from becoming a major pandemic. So there’s the issue of not having supplies, not being ready for a pandemic of any kind in the first place. That was a monumental lack of preparation not only at the federal level but also at the state, local, and local healthcare system levels.
But this global mistake was compounded further at the fed level, because once they started seeing cases in Wuhan, they were slow to acknowledge that COVID-19 was actually threatening to become a pandemic that would reach American shores. They had several weeks to get surveillance, and they couldn’t make sense of what was going on. Part of this is on China’s slow willingness to accept reality, but there was enough time to warn people to take this seriously and to send notification to state and municipal governments that this was a pandemic. Nothing happened.
Not wearing masks is just a symptom of the overall failure. They’re still struggling to play catch up. I get the sense that they’re stuck in between the proverbial rock and hard place of not wanting to incite all-out panic in not wanting to fart out half-baked, unscientifically demonstrated observations, but there may be some situations in which they could probably say “Wearing a mask doesn’t hurt, and it might actually help, so let’s do it.” The problem is, coronavirus is moving so quickly and causing such widespread damage, that once you fall behind, it’s going to overwhelm not only the hospital emergency rooms, but it will also overwhelm the brains of important decision makers. This is moving too quickly for policy-makers and you can see it. There’s no conspiracy here, just poor preparation and now everyone’s paying a huge price.
It might actually even make you safer. It hasn’t been scientifically proven, but at the common sense level, a mask, particularly an unused one that is surgical grade (not even N-95) is a physical barrier. It will protect you against larger droplets. It probably won’t protect you against aerosols, but even an N-95 alone may not do that either. The more people who wear masks, the safer we all are. Just like the less way go out, the safer we all are. A pandemic requires action in numbers. It requires more people making more and more smart decisions, and fewer dumb ones.
One thing we’d have to achieve is to get people to not touch the mask with their dirty hands. Quite often I see people touching their mask with their fingers, but I’m sure they have not ensured their fingers are sanitary. For example, they leave the store with gloved hands and arms full of groceries, and use their dirty gloved hand to move their mask off their face.
Another thing we need to do is get people to STFU when in public. I can’t believe how many people are yaking away on their phone while walking through the grocery store, which provides great opportunity to expel droplets. And stores really need to knock off the happy chat from workers, as that’s another opportunity to spread droplets. With or without masks, people need to reduce the opportunity for droplet spread to a minimum.
Any state with lockdown orders should have restrictions on businesses to ensure minimum opportunities for droplet spread. I would suggest everyone wear a face covering (improvised if necessary), employees keep farther than 6’ away, no unnecessary talking with customers, sanitation requirements between customers, etc. As it is, essential businesses are pretty much carrying on as normal. The state should ensure that they are not a vector for transmission.
Perhaps, if someone coughs right in your face. But in that case, it’s gonna get all over the rest of your face anyway.
It’s true, that if infected people wear masks it makes others safer- but since they wont wear them right- the extra margin of safety is small.
And society has the obligation to isolate you so you don’t infect others. To paraphrase an old saw, your right to be contagious ends about 1/2 mile downwind from me. BTW “natural rights” do not exist but that’s for another forum.
Going back to the OP: somebody was trying to discourage hoarding.
According to Dr. Vanessa Raabe, assistant professor of pediatric infectious diseases at NYU Langone, there’s little scientific evidence to show that medical face masks or other forms of facial protective gear alone are effective in keeping healthy individuals from inhaling infectious particles.
So like I said- masks dont protect YOU. They protect others.
and they are not easy to use:
They also noted that fitted N95 respirators, which many complain are expensive, uncomfortable and difficult to use (even health-care workers take an annual test to prove they know how), performed no better when compared to simple surgical masks.
But they DO help if you are sick:*Raabe explained that most studies show how masks curb sick individuals from spreading infection. *
No, I haven’t “got that” because you are wrong.