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Comment by NotSammyHagar | Hacker News Reader

Actually what you're saying comes across as scaremongering. You're trying to say that there are no legitimate sources, the legitimate sources like the New York times or major medical journals are not trustworthy. You're arguing in favor of what you said is a problem.

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Neither the NYT nor academic journals are a legitimately useful source of COVID-19 information for a layperson. The NYT's coverage has been full of scaremongering and speculation and the world would probably have been better off without it. And a layperson doesn't have the time and training to understand journal articles in context.

The best sources are public health authorities like the WHO and CDC. They have consistently made careful and measured statements, been fairly accurate, minimized scaremongering and speculation without understating the seriousness of the situation, and issued useful recommendations. Most people would be better off following these authorities directly and ignoring other coverage.

I mostly agree with you, but the WHO and CDC famously told people not to wear masks for way too long after data was distributed showing mask's effectiveness for preventing infection. I would not trust them.

The not wearing masks things was terrible, because it seems like they probably recognized there was some benefit but they wanted to reserve them for health workers. That what I always thought and I'm not alone. The WHO seems to have a series of flawed statements (like the one recently where they made a misleading comment about asymptomatic people). It's like the who needs to hire a competent pr agency. If only they had said "there's some protective affect by wearing masks but we want to prioritize health workers getting ppe while we ramp up manufacturing".

> but the WHO and CDC famously told people not to wear masks for way too long after data was distributed showing mask's effectiveness for preventing infection

Do you have links to that data? For you to make this claim you'd be able to link to a meta-analysis or a well run RCT.

As usual there is nuance to this story which the incendiary popular media failed to capture, because it doesn't bait clicks.

Early on the WHO's biggest concern was that panic buying would lead to mask shortages for health care workers. If you have to choose between an unmasked public and unmasked health care workers, having the public go without is definitely the better option.

So IIRC around March they issued the guideline - if you feel sick, wear a mask, otherwise don't. And it made sense in context, because after masks worn by health care workers, the infected are the next most effective place to deploy masks in terms of protecting public health.

Eventually mask supply increased because everybody started producing them. The WHO then changed its recommendation to "everyone should wear."

So I don't really think the WHO did anything wrong here. But because of the one-sided way it was portrayed in the media, the negatives got amplified and we ended up with "WHO NWO EXPOSED MILLIONS DEAD!! BILL GATES EUTHANIZES AFRICA CONTINENT GLOBAL ELITES KILLING VACCINE PEDOPHILIA" all over YouTube. Again.

WHO posted a tweet on March 28 saying "COVID 19 is not airborne" and downplaying any need for protective masks and it's still up: https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1243972193169616898

It's not airborne. It's spread by droplets and fomites.

This is definitely a distinction which WHO should rely upon its Twitter followers to parse accurately. /s

Any mention of masks is conspicuously absent from their "what you should do to protect yourself" list. More than that, they stamped a giant "INCORRECT" over a social media image which, although it probably did get some details wrong, was much more on the right track than WHO with "Wear a mask everywhere!"

Can you link to a meta-analysis or a well run RCT that shows benefits to mask wearing?

There are a few that don't show any benefit to wearing masks.

What should CDC / WHO / etc do then? They have evidence, it's good quality, but it doesn't show any benefits to masks wearing. Should they tell people to wear masks? We didn't know at the time whether this would cause people to drop social distancing or not. There was a real risk that people would wear masks, but drop isolation.

Wearing a mask can’t increase your risk of infection. Unless it blocks 0% of droplets, it can’t possibly have no net improvement. And if they really were that useless, why do we keep getting doctors to wear them?

I feel you should be linking to a study showing that telling people they must wear masks to go out would reduce social distancing. To me, the requirement to wear a mask only reinforces the danger.

Your first claim isn't true. A mask worn with good hygiene practices won't increase your risk. But taking a mask off, touching it, and then doing other things before washing your hands can.

If your mask got infected while wearing it, then you would have gotten infected had you not been wearing it anyways. So even if your poor hand hygiene renders the mask unhelpful, wearing the mask doesn’t overall increase your risk.

> You're trying to say that there are no legitimate sources, the legitimate sources like the New York times or major medical journals are not trustworthy.

Newspapers are at best a secondary source, not primary.

Academic journals are intended to disseminate articles to be subjected to peer review, which means they are intended to spark discussions over observations among researchers in the field. This means that, with the exception of academic fraud, it's expected that their content doesn't reflect solid understanding of the issues involved. Otherwise they would be pointless as scientific papers.

The NYT was definitely on the "news that was better than the facts" train for quite awhile in the early days of the pandemic. I would argue the media as a whole is still largely downplaying how bad things are, likely as a matter of serving the imperatives of their corporate owners, but this isn't an idea which finds any purchase with conservatives (who want not to be inconvenienced by COVID in any way) or liberals (who are allergic to most criticism of the news media or anything which can be painted with the "conspiratorial" brush).

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