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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

What made them believe the US public was willing to socially distance in the first place? Was that backed up with data or was it another baseless assumption?

Stating your rationale doesn't mean your rationale is backed up with evidence.

Again, top public health officials need to be held to a higher standard. That means understanding how populations behave, not just understanding the medicine. That means consistent messaging. The message throughout should've been:

> This is a dangerous virus, and the best way not to get it is to avoid contact with any other people at all. However, if you absolutely need to come into contact with other individuals, risk can be reduced if everyone is wearing a mask. Masks are not anywhere near 100% effective, but they do help, which is why you should be avoiding human contact and only be going out with a mask if absolutely necessary.

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In the early months of the outbreak there was almost no evidence, and yet we reasonably expected the experts to give their best shot at an answer. They looked at the probabilities as best they could estimate them from the characteristics of similar diseases, that's all the evidence they had at the time, and updated their guidance as they got more data.

The problem has always been that this disease is very unusual in many different ways. This has quite understandably caused many best efforts at estimating it's behaviour to turn out to be wrong.

It's really not enough though. Populations (and arguably esp. the American population) are not automatons that you can just direct and they will follow orders when you first tell them to go left and then soon after tell "oops, actually you should've gone right".

Messaging needs to be consistent and err on the side of caution... this was the exact opposite of both of those things.

SARS-CoV-2 is actually not that unusual – the mRNA COVID vaccines that have been developed are based on the spike protein that is common to all "coronaviruses" (hence the name) and was previously isolated from SARS-CoV-1 (i.e. SARS). At the very least we knew it was a coronavirus early on, so there is no reason you wouldn't assume it was respiratory in nature, just like SARS was.

We knew it was respiratory right from the start, but that doesn’t mean the virus load on small droplets is enough to cause transmission. There’s an awful lot more to it than that. As for credibility, suppose they had recommended everyone wear masks and it turned out to have no appreciable effect. What consequences would that have had, especially amongst those claiming the whole thing was a scare?

Honesty is always the best policy?

> This is a coronavirus, just as SARS was before it. This one seems both more lethal and more contagious than SARS, so we are recommending everyone wears a face-mask (even one you've made yourself) when you go to any public place until we understand more about the virus.

etc. etc. etc.

Not "no need to wear a face mask".

Is slicing the context off his statements honest? Fauci did not just say there was no need. He was very specific and clear that he didn't have enough evidence to recommend it.

Again, a competent public health official would err on the side of caution while simultaneously being honest about it.

No, masks were mandated for health personnel dealing with COVID from day one. It was simply a lot of bad faith/ascientific messaging by WHO and national authorities early on.

This also to a large extent fuelled the anti-makser movement you have trouble reigning in now. Absolutely moronic.

The anti-masker movement would have happened anyway. There's no logical consistency there which is very apparent when you listen to their "arguments".

It would have certainly happened. It could also never have reached such a magnitude had health authorities not proclaimed for 3 months that masks are the new facehuggers.

Yes, except Fauci was against masks because of fake science, I mean because of supply. I.e He lied. (And has admitted it was because of supply).

https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...

And most anti-maskers are against it because of government overreach. Unrelated to science.

A third party has emerged. The "we'll believe and parrot anything because it's what we're told".

They act in the following realm (whether they are aware or not): Cotton/cloth masks don't work. But it qualifies as a mask so checkbox! Moral superiority is on my side whether science is or not doesn't matter.

PPE was recommended for people dealing with Covid positive.

Fauci lied (and admitted to it) that masks weren't effective and suggested that the average person should not wear them.

To be fair, I heard the whole medical community here (I'm in one of the largest medical centers in the world) laugh and scoff at normal people wearing masks (because they weren't trained and it isn't effective).

And now we have no N95 for the general public and idiotic cloth masks (that don't work).

So it turns out they weren't far off I their scoffing... But for the wrong reasons.

Now we see them (and other anto-science) normals flip and ignore the data on bad masks. "Something is better than nothing". False sense of security and just more lies and moral superiority.

> What made them believe the US public was willing to socially distance in the first place? Was that backed up with data or was it another baseless assumption?

Maybe all of the other examples of Americans coming together against a common threat from the last couple of centuries?

The messaging wasn't consistent. The POTUS ranted and raved on Twitter ad nausium about how its all a hoax.

Like the 3 waves of the Spanish Flu?

This was what they said!

Do you not remember the March lockdowns?

Everyone was saying that except Trump and the people in the Administration whose mouths he taped shut, next thought he'd look bad if a pandemic existed so he said things like "there's a dozen cases now, they'll be none soon; this will be over by Easter". Then when he was briefly reined in, we had a belated national effort to lockdown with "30 days to stop the spread".

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