I am puzzled by a somewhat amusing phenomenon. There are thousands of people on social media screaming “Stop buying masks! They are useless”. That’s intriguing. If they are useless, why do you care?
...It is even stranger that some people reply: “hospitals need the masks”. So… hospitals think that masks are useful? Then they are not useless. In fact, they seem to be indispensable. Then the correct statement would be: “Stop buying masks! They are extremely useful!”
...Did you notice that perfectly healthy World Health Organization officials always wear masks during their news briefings to reporters? It’s because they now believe that you can transmit the virus even if you don’t have the symptoms, so potentially anyone around you (healthy or sick) may be contagious.
...I am not competent enough to judge how effective a mask can be in the case of this covid-19. I am just intrigued that so many people have joined the anti-mask crusade despite these obvious logical contradictions.
He’s very independent and doesn’t try to compete in the attention landscape like most blogs, so I take it as a fairly strong datapoint that these are fairly obvious inconsistencies to the public.
The brief post The Bizarre Adventures of the Surgical Mask by renaissance man-of-lists Piero Scaruffi makes a lot of similar arguments to the NYT article. Some quotes:
He’s very independent and doesn’t try to compete in the attention landscape like most blogs, so I take it as a fairly strong datapoint that these are fairly obvious inconsistencies to the public.