The actual experts I was paying attention to said that wearing a K/N-94/95 type mask lowers the statistical rate of transmission, that is, infection of others by your deadly virus.
The subsequent findings are that cloth-type masks are less effective (but not wholly ineffective) compared to clinical/surgical masks at limiting the aerosolized viral shedding from those already infected. So if a cloth mask was all you had, the advice became "please wear it".
Turns out, many people assume advice is only relevant when given for their own direct & immediate personal benefit, so they hear what they want to hear, and even the idea of giving a shit about externalities is sheer anathema. That gets boiled down further for idiot-grade TV and bad-faith social media troll engagement and we wind up with reductive and snarky soundbites, like the remark above, that help nobody at all.
Back on topic, the choice of so-called "experts" in the Guardian's coverage of the AWS matter seems to be a classic matchup of journalistic expediency with self-promoting interests to pad an article that otherwise has little to say beyond paraphrasing Amazon's operational updates.
It's unclear what you're arguing. The leading experts (Fauci/CDC) who most Americans were paying attention to were not providing this shading of meaning which you are trying to impute to them. That would be the case if they said something like N95 masks will provide excellent protection for you from the virus if worn correctly, but we have a shortage, so please make do with alternatives so that health care workers have access to them. That is not what they said. Instead they sacrificed credibility at the altar of expediency to the detriment of future trust.
What's reductive is assuming that people are motivated exclusively by self-interest instead of trusting them to make good decisions when told the truth.
> When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.
> But, when you think masks, you should think of health care providers needing them and people who are ill... It could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it.
He said that there's a shortage, and that he didn't trust that people would wear the masks correctly. I remember that most of the early anti-mask guidance I heard was claims that they weren't likely to prevent yourself from getting infected because: the mask would become an infectious surface; and people wouldn't handle the mask as infectious.
> It is mainly to prevent those people who have the virus — and might not know it — from spreading the infection to others.
> U.S. health authorities have long maintained that face masks should be reserved only for medical professionals and patients suffering from COVID-19, the deadly disease caused by the coronavirus. The CDC had based this recommendation on the fact that such coverings offer little protection for wearers, and the need to conserve the country's alarmingly sparse supplies of personal protective equipment.
Sounds more like you chose to ignore it. My family was wearing medical-grade disposable facemasks and socially distancing from February 2020 on the basis of healthcare advice.
Hunting for a bogeyman in retrospect is the bad-faith narrative of the mediocre culture warrior. Good luck with your undifferentiated rage or whatever.
Right?! Same with seatbelts. I don’t wear mine because there’s obviously still automobile deaths. Experts said seatbelts would protect us from deadly accidents. What else are they wrong about?!
That counterargument might make sense if seat belts were not generally protective in accidents or if experts were telling you to wear crepe paper seat belts instead of nylon ones because the nylon ones were needed elsewhere.
Those comments were made in an information regime that severly censored contrary expert opinion. We had experts in various related field who were automatically labeled as cranks simply because they disagreed with the social engineering experiment and test run of various social control mechanisms (worldwide ..).
Was that from actual experts, or bad faith strawman coverage (plenty of that about).
At least in my country, there was sober objective coverage from experts about their purpose and percentage effectiveness at reducing the range and spread of potentially infected droplets. Masks were somewhat effective for filtering incoming droplets, but most effective at containing outgoing droplets. The smaller the viral load you were exposed to the lower your chances of getting infected. Experts never claimed them to be 100% though, it was about reducing transmission rates not absolute protection.
Which is the main reason they're used in surgery too coincidentally (they aren't primarily for the surgeon's protection). Or is that an even longer running conspiracy?
