Because we were told to expect different. Early on, it was "masks don't prevent the spread of coronavirus" from the CDC. Then, when they recanted, it was "cloth doesn't do anything." Then, the...
So why have our expectations?
Because we were told to expect different. Early on, it was "masks don't prevent the spread of coronavirus" from the CDC. Then, when they recanted, it was "cloth doesn't do anything." Then, the authorities, who had a duty to responsibly report any and all information, flipped completely, and are wondering why people don't trust them/don't think masks will help/underestimate their effectiveness. It's not the fault of the researchers, but some of the blame is on government scientists who shape public policy, and on the people creating bogus policies. Science already takes time to become culturally relevant with significant lag time from the paper to policy. This time around, everything was done in the worst possible way.
The only point at which the article gets close to the root is this quote:
Behavioral norms also matter, regardless of how much evidence backs them up
They understand the importance of norms, but ignore, most likely by accident, how the early establishment of certain norms directly answers the question posed by the article.
Note: somehow this comment got mangled, I don't know how, and I rewrote about half of the first paragraph.
CDC have not recanted. Their opinion about mask wearing remains the same: masks do not protect members of the public from getting nor transmitting respiratory disease. Look carefully at the...
Because we were told to expect different. Early on, it was "masks don't prevent the spread of coronavirus" from the CDC. Then, when they recanted, it was "cloth doesn't do anything." Then, the authorities, who had a duty to responsibly report any and all information, flipped completely,
CDC have not recanted. Their opinion about mask wearing remains the same: masks do not protect members of the public from getting nor transmitting respiratory disease. Look carefully at the language CDC use. They tell you that you must wash your hands, that handwashing does protect you. For masks the CDC say that masks do not protect you, but they may (not will) protect other people from you. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/about-face-coverings.html
There's this weird belief that masks are super effective, and that CDC knew this all along. To support that point should be really easy: just post a link to the RCT that shows benefits to mask wearing. This would show that the evidence existed, and we can assume that CDC was aware of it. If masks were so effective, if the effect was so strong, it should be easy to show benefit in RCT. We have lots of research on masks, and it's all such poor quality that we can't say if masks help or not. Right now they best we can say is "we think they should work; but we don't know if they do or not".
I think you're either not reading that page very carefully or wrote something stronger than you intended, since it doesn't seem to support "masks do not protect members of the public from getting...
I think you're either not reading that page very carefully or wrote something stronger than you intended, since it doesn't seem to support "masks do not protect members of the public from getting nor transmitting respiratory disease."
Cloth face coverings may help prevent people who have COVID-19 from spreading the virus to others. Wearing a cloth face covering will help protect people around you, including those at higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19 and workers who frequently come into close contact with other people (e.g., in stores and restaurants). Cloth face coverings are most likely to reduce the spread of COVID-19 when they are widely used by people in public settings.
But part of this might hinge on what you mean by "protect?" If you mean "prevent transmission entirely" then cloth masks don't do that, which is why social distancing and handwashing also help. But the bar for recommending a public health measure isn't that high. Anything that lowers transmission on average can have a significant effect on public health due to how exponential growth compounds - it can change the growth rate or reverse the trend (if it drops below 1.0.) For an individual it can lower probability of transmission when combined with other imperfect methods of prevention.
I think this is another root issue in the whole face mask discussion: not everyone seems to agree on where the bar actually lies for making the recommendation viable or not. Some will argue masks...
But part of this might hinge on what you mean by "protect?" If you mean "prevent transmission entirely" then cloth masks don't do that, which is why social distancing and handwashing also help.
I think this is another root issue in the whole face mask discussion: not everyone seems to agree on where the bar actually lies for making the recommendation viable or not. Some will argue masks aren't provably effective enough at preventing transmission and are therefore a dead end, others will consider a slight advantage enough when combined with other preventive measures. But neither position is fundamentally flawed, they both operate on valid premises, so it's hard to really pick one side and authoritatively state that they are right and the others are just plain wrong.
That page explains that cloth masks help prevent the spread of coronavirus. It's also really difficult to find pages with the initial anti-mask messaging, as even news articles are being deleted...
That page explains that cloth masks help prevent the spread of coronavirus. It's also really difficult to find pages with the initial anti-mask messaging, as even news articles are being deleted now by the sites that put them out (one Seattle station did this).
I'll correct myself, the Surgeon General was more vocal than the CDC, but they were both consistent in their messaging that normal people wearing the masks will not decrease spreading of the virus. More nuanced accounts have said because of mask-touching, but the pervading notion in the US was substantially less nuanced than that. Again, science being filtered through policy, with further obfuscation through media.
A UCSF epediemiologist mentioned in this great interview that it may have been a balance between the science as it stood and politics. A nation-wide mask requirement would have expended a lot of the federal government's political capital for what was at the time not a major outbreak. However, I would still say their messaging was bad, and they could have gone with "we don't suspect there's enough of a risk for people to benefit from wearing masks yet," or something better than I can come up with on the fly.
The real answers are because the US is currently ludicrously polarised, and because most people's understanding of science is piss-poor. This kind of thing is infuriating. We don't know whether...
The real answers are because the US is currently ludicrously polarised, and because most people's understanding of science is piss-poor.
In response to the lack of support, he launched a bipartisan campaign called Masks4All that lobbied for widespread mask-wearing and argued that masks were a crucial, if not the most important, part of the COVID-19 response.
This kind of thing is infuriating. We don't know whether masks work or not. (it's really hard to see any benefit to mask wearing from research). We do know that hand washing works and we know that distancing works.
Do cloth face coverings work? Probably, to some extent. But just how much they work depends on the material, how they’re used, and what you’re expecting them to accomplish. And — regardless of what you’ve seen in highly shareable memes — we definitely don’t know enough to say that wearing these kinds of coverings will reduce risk of transmission by a specific percentage, let alone a high percentage. Those were the conclusions of an expert report published by the National Academies of Sciences on April 8, and two of the lead authors of that paper recently told me the science hasn’t significantly changed since then. Some studies have come out showing a correlation in certain regions between mask mandates and reduced spread of the coronavirus, but several of those not-yet-peer-reviewed studies have turned out to have important flaws — such as failing to account for factors like other behaviors (such as higher rates of social distancing) that went along with wearing masks in those places.
Because we were told to expect different. Early on, it was "masks don't prevent the spread of coronavirus" from the CDC. Then, when they recanted, it was "cloth doesn't do anything." Then, the authorities, who had a duty to responsibly report any and all information, flipped completely, and are wondering why people don't trust them/don't think masks will help/underestimate their effectiveness. It's not the fault of the researchers, but some of the blame is on government scientists who shape public policy, and on the people creating bogus policies. Science already takes time to become culturally relevant with significant lag time from the paper to policy. This time around, everything was done in the worst possible way.
The only point at which the article gets close to the root is this quote:
They understand the importance of norms, but ignore, most likely by accident, how the early establishment of certain norms directly answers the question posed by the article.
Note: somehow this comment got mangled, I don't know how, and I rewrote about half of the first paragraph.
CDC have not recanted. Their opinion about mask wearing remains the same: masks do not protect members of the public from getting nor transmitting respiratory disease. Look carefully at the language CDC use. They tell you that you must wash your hands, that handwashing does protect you. For masks the CDC say that masks do not protect you, but they may (not will) protect other people from you. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/about-face-coverings.html
There's this weird belief that masks are super effective, and that CDC knew this all along. To support that point should be really easy: just post a link to the RCT that shows benefits to mask wearing. This would show that the evidence existed, and we can assume that CDC was aware of it. If masks were so effective, if the effect was so strong, it should be easy to show benefit in RCT. We have lots of research on masks, and it's all such poor quality that we can't say if masks help or not. Right now they best we can say is "we think they should work; but we don't know if they do or not".
I think you're either not reading that page very carefully or wrote something stronger than you intended, since it doesn't seem to support "masks do not protect members of the public from getting nor transmitting respiratory disease."
But part of this might hinge on what you mean by "protect?" If you mean "prevent transmission entirely" then cloth masks don't do that, which is why social distancing and handwashing also help. But the bar for recommending a public health measure isn't that high. Anything that lowers transmission on average can have a significant effect on public health due to how exponential growth compounds - it can change the growth rate or reverse the trend (if it drops below 1.0.) For an individual it can lower probability of transmission when combined with other imperfect methods of prevention.
I think this is another root issue in the whole face mask discussion: not everyone seems to agree on where the bar actually lies for making the recommendation viable or not. Some will argue masks aren't provably effective enough at preventing transmission and are therefore a dead end, others will consider a slight advantage enough when combined with other preventive measures. But neither position is fundamentally flawed, they both operate on valid premises, so it's hard to really pick one side and authoritatively state that they are right and the others are just plain wrong.
That page explains that cloth masks help prevent the spread of coronavirus. It's also really difficult to find pages with the initial anti-mask messaging, as even news articles are being deleted now by the sites that put them out (one Seattle station did this).
I'll correct myself, the Surgeon General was more vocal than the CDC, but they were both consistent in their messaging that normal people wearing the masks will not decrease spreading of the virus. More nuanced accounts have said because of mask-touching, but the pervading notion in the US was substantially less nuanced than that. Again, science being filtered through policy, with further obfuscation through media.
A UCSF epediemiologist mentioned in this great interview that it may have been a balance between the science as it stood and politics. A nation-wide mask requirement would have expended a lot of the federal government's political capital for what was at the time not a major outbreak. However, I would still say their messaging was bad, and they could have gone with "we don't suspect there's enough of a risk for people to benefit from wearing masks yet," or something better than I can come up with on the fly.
The real answers are because the US is currently ludicrously polarised, and because most people's understanding of science is piss-poor.
This kind of thing is infuriating. We don't know whether masks work or not. (it's really hard to see any benefit to mask wearing from research). We do know that hand washing works and we know that distancing works.
From the article: