...during disasters, people can show strikingly altruistic behavior, but interventions by authorities can backfire if they fuel mistrust or treat the public as an adversary rather than people who will step up if treated with respect. Given that even homemade masks may work better than no masks, wearing them might be something to direct people to do while they stay at home more, as we all should.
We will no doubt face many challenges as the pandemic moves through our societies, and people will need to cooperate. The sooner we create the conditions under which such cooperation can bloom, the better off we all will be.
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] CDC created a test requiring a slow RT-PCR reaction on a specific model of machine to be run overnight, not designing the right primers, and not realizing this for a month. This was both strategically (using 30-year-old technology) and tactically (designing wrong primers) incompetent. I would expect most graduate students to do better.
He also feels that the CDC is giving lousy information. In their FAQ, their answer to whether your child is at risk for Covid-19 fails to mention that children reliably have much milder disease courses than adults. He says:
It’s clear that kids get less sick if at all. Why doesn’t the CDC say so? It won’t hurt to tell the truth! If you provide such lousy information, people will stop trusting you.
I think this is consistent with the primary goal of communication from major institutions being to prevent people from doing stupid things, over and above being open and honest.
This NYT Opinion Piece discusses some of the same points as the above, titled Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired. It closes:
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.
The highly detailed slideshow on Covid-19 by Michael Lin (PhD-MD) has comments reminiscent of the OP. Lin says:
He also feels that the CDC is giving lousy information. In their FAQ, their answer to whether your child is at risk for Covid-19 fails to mention that children reliably have much milder disease courses than adults. He says:
I think this is consistent with the primary goal of communication from major institutions being to prevent people from doing stupid things, over and above being open and honest.