Did you ever consider that the CDC guidelines for masks were intended to prevent hoarding so that those treating patients on the front lines could access them?
No, I think most of us realized that. It's still not OK for the CDC to lie to the public, regardless of motive. For a public health organization, the end doesn't justify the means.
Even more concerning are the number of doctors I've seen blatantly lying about the effectiveness of masks. Most people aren't idiots - if the masks help protect medical professionals from Covid-19, they can also help non-medical professionals.
The proper message would have been: masks can be effective, even a bandana can likely help prevent disease transmission. But it's important for Americans to save N95 masks for medical professionals until they're widely available. Given that it's highly likely that wearing any mask helps prevent the spread of the virus by keeping the mask wearer from transmitting it to others, this is what they should have done.
It's not classic trolley problem, because there are no second order effects modeled in the trolley problem. In this case, there is a secondary effect which is that the public realises they've been lied to and loses trust in public health authorities, which is exactly what has happened. You can only do that a couple of times before the authority has no authority.
This is different. A public health organization can only lie at large scale once before it loses the credibility that allows it to function in the first place.
It is not even remotely a given that throwing the switch is the correct answer. The Czech Republic made masks mandatory, met that requirement by churning out a bunch of homemade masks, and have supposedly been quite successful in flattening their infection curve in doing so.
Going forward, misinformation gives every anti-vaxxer, skeptic, conspiracy theorist, and snake oil peddling bullshitter more ammunition with which to displace effective medical treatment going forward. Even the well meaning general populace becomes skeptical. You know what this results in?
Dead kids. Covid parties.
Trust in government is already so fucking slow people are throwing covid parties. And now you're suggesting that undermining that trust even more is the obvious answer?
A load of people in this thread are saying the CDC (and others) are lying about masks.
For members of the public walking around a mask provides at best marginal benefit, and that's only if the wearer complies with a strict regime of donning and doffing protocols, and if it's combined with a full set of other PPE (disposable gowns, gloves, eye shields) and frequent handwashing.
As soon as you drop any of those you're not just making the mask a bit less effective, you're probably increasing the risk over not wearing a mask at all.
There are a few routes of transmission -
fecal oral; fomites to hand and then to eyes, nose, or mouth; and droplets landing on your eyes or being breathed in.
It's likely that in members of the public the main route is touching an infected surface and then touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Masks only help with breathing in droplets, and they only help if they're worn correctly. Incorrect mask wearing increases risk because masks feel weird and cause people to touch their face more often, and because masks give permission to people to go outside and mingle in crowds.
There's not much research around whether members of the public can wear PPE correctly, but there's plenty of research around PPE and healthcare professionals. We know that qualified registered healthcare professionals who know the consequences of not wearing PPE correctly still struggle to do it all correctly.
> Most people aren't idiots - if the masks help protect medical professionals from Covid-19, they can also help non-medical professionals.
The difference is that healthcare professionals spend all day in close contact with symptomatic people and are more likely to come into contact with blood or fecal matter or sputum, and are more likely to be doing aerosol-generating procedures, so the baseline risk is much higher, so that marginal benefit turns into an actual benefit. But importantly they're not just wearing masks. They're wearing gowns and gloves and eye protection and they have access to water and soap and alcohol hand gels and infection control teams to train them on how to wear it correctly.
> even a bandana can likely help prevent disease transmission
You're basing this on a small study carried out in a lab using research bacteria (not viruses) carried in a calibrated spray, that didn't include "people breathing through the mask". You've massively overstated those results.
A public entity, whose stated mission is to provide timely and accurate information to the public, actually lies to the public in order to influence some third-hand outcome, such as less hoarding: a net positive?
I would argue no, not a net positive at all. To start, nearly everyone now distrusts the CDC (and WHO) to deliver accurate information.
That is not their mission, stated or otherwise. The repeated emphasis is on health and saving lives.
> CDC works 24/7 to protect America from health, safety and security threats, both foreign and in the U.S. Whether diseases start at home or abroad, are chronic or acute, curable or preventable, human error or deliberate attack, CDC fights disease and supports communities and citizens to do the same.
> CDC increases the health security of our nation. As the nation’s health protection agency, CDC saves lives and protects people from health threats. To accomplish our mission, CDC conducts critical science and provides health information that protects our nation against expensive and dangerous health threats, and responds when these arise.
I think the same people who were inclined to distrust health organizations probably continue to do so, and the folks who were inclined to trust health organizations probably continue to do so as well.
> I think the same people who were inclined to distrust health organizations probably continue to do so, and the folks who were inclined to trust health organizations probably continue to do so as well.
This implies that trusting public health organizations is some kind of personal preference? Or that health organizations are inherent liars? Not sure what you're getting at.
Let's adjust the statement a bit to parse out its meaning, and make it not about health organizations, but about lying organizations.
"I think the same people who were inclined to distrust [lying] organizations probably continue to do so, and the folks who were inclined to trust [lying] organizations probably continue to do so as well."
They should have told the truth.
“Mask help but we don’t have enough of them. We need to reserve the few we have for doctors and nurses. People should use diy masks until we have more. It’s not perfect but it will still help to flatten the curve.“
right but everyone is out and about. while people in asian wore masks when they went grocery shppping. i get what they did but they screwed civilians for sure in the name of saving doctors. they actively lied about them being needed so one group would have a better chance. the truth is if you were going to have any contact with someone you needed a mask.
> i get what they did but they screwed civilians for sure in the name of saving doctors. they actively lied about them being needed so one group would have a better chance.
Think a moment. The sick people need the doctors and nurses alive. Stripping the supply of PPE for medical professionals is lose-lose for everyone. Even if only all of the high-risk non-medical-workers bought effective masks, it would obliterate the supply available to nurses and doctors.
Lie once, lie always. Honesty is imperative for a public trust.
Now, what do you think the crazy anti-vaxxers will say, next time they're told to trust the CDC, and other public bodies, and that vaccination is safe, and makes sense?
When a vaccine is created, perhaps, for this virus?
Now it is easier to convince others that the truth is concealed. That lies abound.
Any medical official should lose their license, for spreading quackery.
Is that still true? These reported numbers for the US are very much outdated. Would love to see a source younger than a decade.
All seem to come from the same sources, a 2009 and a 2012 study. The Forbes article actually mentions an alternative source, an article from 2015 [2] which is actually looking at regional 2000-2009 data. You can also follow the links at Wikipedia [0].
For Germany, there are numbers from 2017: The German Office for Statistics is reported in 2019 28.031 ICU beds which is a rate of 33.7 per 100,000 inhabitants.
EDIT:
This [3] WoPo article references data from 2016-2018: 93,000 ICU beds in total in the US. That's about 36 ICU beds per capita (aged 16 or older).
For comparison, Germany, based on the 28031 ICU beds and 70976000 inhabitants 16 or older [4] has 39,49 ICU beds per capita.
The number of beds per capita is one thing, how many are free or can be freed in the next few days/weeks is another. At least in Germany it was reported that a lot of them were in use and less than half were available for coronavirus patients.
We can't. It's not just a number of beds. It's also how long people stay there (which really depends on healthcare system). E.g. in countries with poor healthcare level people tend to stay in bed longer than in countries with good healthcare. Plus the average "normal" level of ICU occupation might be different (e.g. one country has 70% threshold, while another one 40%).
Just yesterday on German news they reported that Germany had most ICU beds per capita in the world. No idea if it's true. I guess no one ever knows the correct current numbers.
It's also a really well written paper. Isn't it impressive how people just read into it and assume that there must be all these criteria that make the data better without them being detailed or a control group? Not many academic papers can communicate things (of differing levels of veracity) that they want to communicate but can't say explicitly so well.
There seem to be a huge number of people reading about this topic online who just want to be comforted and are willing to throw all critical thinking out the window to that end. That's the only way I can figure why all these optimistic but poorly designed papers are being cheered on places like HN and /r/covid19, not to mention the news.
Theres a reason even the language of scams - snake oil - has an origin in health panacea. Health and money have ways of getting people to believe things that they should be quite a bit more sceptical of.
The lack of a control group is frustrating, but the comparison to outcomes in untreated groups documented in China still makes me feel this treatment holds promise:
"For all other patients in this cohort of 80 people, the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin resulted in a clinical improvement that appeared significant when compared to the natural evolution in patients with a definite outcome, as described in the literature. In a cohort of 191 Chinese inpatients, of whom 95% received antibiotics and 21% received an association of lopinavir and ritonavir, the median duration of fever was 12 days and that of cough 19 days in survivors, with a 28% case-fatality rate (18). The favourable evolution of our patients under hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin was associated with a relatively rapid decrease in viral RNA load as assessed by PCR, which was even more rapid when assessed by culture."
The Communist Party enjoys the luxury of dissent being a punishable offense. The media, the citizenry, the private sector are all held hostage by the absolute authority of the Party.
I'm not sure why, but the media seems so eager to accept the official CCP narrative and take the lack of clear dissent from within China to mean China should be held up as a model Nation worthy of praise while simultaneously ignoring all the restrictions and brutality that force silent those who otherwise might have much to complain about.
Deference to China by naive journalists and other useful idiots must be checked.
There's CCP spread suggestions that coronavirus originated in the US (and was brought to China by the US army?). I don't think we're accepting all of CCP's narrative, because some of the ideas are quite obviously batshit crazy.
I don't many outside of China accepting everything the CCP is saying about coronavirus.
I do think it's probably worth waiting to evaluate until we have more real, verifiable numbers. Some of what people are saying is likely true. Some of it is likely not.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
