My take is obviously experts have been wrong about some things, but viewing this as a failure is a fundamental misunderstanding. If you want scientists to know everything important about a new virus you’ll need to wait years. That isn’t really an option here... https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1277234902606454784 …
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Replying to @stgoldst
Also I think it’s notable that the experts in the US weren’t saying anything drastically different than the experts in countries where the rates have dropped and kept dropping. So I’m not sure how the experts get the blame here.
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Replying to @AstroKatie @stgoldst
The one really bad mistake early on was imploring people not to wear masks. If there was one thing to change in this whole episode, this might be it. If the govt had been on top of things, there wouldn't have been a shortage and they wouldn't have had to tell us not to buy them.
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Replying to @ajwerth @AstroKatie
Masks is one where early guidance wasn’t helpful. But most people are wearing cloth masks now, and data on these didn’t even exist before covid. Surgical masks are better but were in extremely short supply.
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I think it's misleading to say mask policies changed because of new data. Most of papers cited by
#Masks4All advocates like@jeremyphoward &@zeynep, especially in March, predate the pandemic. Public Health misjudged the value of cloth masks, better to admit mistakes.1 reply 1 retweet 3 likes -
I don’t think it was clear early that cloth masks are very effective, and there was a real need to avoid a run on medical masks. That said, due to the possibility of benefit and no harm, guidance on this should have been modified sooner for sure.
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I disagree with the first part of your tweet but don't want to drag us into the black hole of Twitter mask debates. I do think that it will take a long time to regain public trust after the switch from "masks may do more harm" to "masks are required".
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As soon as we realized the surgical mask shortage though (in January) it was possible to 1-ramp up production; 2-immediately start researching efficacy of alternatives for source-control; 3-ration distribution (a la Taiwan); 4-be truthful (rather than nonsense about harms)...
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The failure isn't just that we didn't know enough... Weirdly, for masks, there was active resistance and harmful messaging. We didn't know much about fomite risks either (seems not that much) but we had an effective and loud campaign about hand hygiene (no RCTs there either!).
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