He did! He said they were just cosmetic, feel-good etc.
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Also, so many public health experts at the time were arguing, incorrectly, that there was a risk of false sense of security (no evidence to think that, and evidence not to think that) and that incorrect wearing would increase risk of infection (how? no evidence for that either).
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Many were doctors who couldn't grasp the difference between PPE at a hospital setting where incorrect wearing *compared to correct wearing* was indeed worse for self-protection and community-mask wearing for source protection compared to *no masks*. I caught so much grief!
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There was a viral Forbes article titled something like "masks increase risk"--still being shared by mask-deniers (though they finally changed headline). Almost every outlet ran these stories that made no sense, but they ran them. Many viral threads by experts in the field...
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It took a month to get CDC to move, three months to get WHO to move. And there was no widespread, strong and open push-back to either the CDC or the WHO by the actual experts in the field. If there was, we would never have to be so out there on this topic.
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On the one hand, armchair expertise is of course not a good thing. On the other hand, expertise has to step up to earn that trust, not declare it their right just because. I don't think the field and its experts has grappled with how much trust they lost because of those months.
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There was also all the "hand washing is enough to keep you safe" stuff
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Replying to @jeremyphoward @zeynep and
After CNN warned that China says coronavirus can spread before symptoms show. Osterholm dismissed it. “I seriously doubt that the Chinese public officials have any data supporting this statement"
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On the hand-washing and the denial of transmission before/without symptoms: I think a lot of fighting-the-last-war was going on; influenza for hand-washing and SARS which was always symptomatic. That's always the tragedy of expertise; hard-won battles are tomorrow's blind spots.
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Also for SARS the first and most well known big spreading event seemed to be linked to fomites. So there was a big narrative bias in the experts minds around fomite spread. Many people were *way* too attached to their priors, and failed to do the research on *this* virus.
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In fairness, that's a reasonable course of action at first: suspect everything and emphasize priors. But it was so slow. We were well into April when people were still torturing their Amazon boxes with bleach and nursing their chapped hands, while still not wearing masks indoors.
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Replying to @zeynep @jeremyphoward and
I think a lot of this is related to tortured decision processes, leading to unclear or no authoritative messaging. The whole concept of authority & where it comes from has been undermined. By parties that control major channels for disseminating public health messages
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