LogFAQs > #954620463

MartianManchild posted...

Things like mask usage

I always love watching people bitching about how the guidance on mask usage changed because it's clear they haven't the slightest fucking clue how science - and epidemiology specifically - works.

The reason why medical personnel - Fauci included - originally said that masks were not needed by the general populace is that masks are, generally speaking, fucking useless against viruses. Viruses are tiny and most will slip right through the fibres of a cloth mask. It would be like trying to keep mosquitoes out of your yard by putting up a chain-link fence. As such, the initial thinking was that people panic-buying masks wasn't helping anything, since they would be ineffective against a coronavirus, and it was putting a run on medical supplies that were badly needed by hospital staff (who need to worry about a lot more than just one specific disease and also need sterile environments so as to not cause further infections in their patients).

But as we learned more about the this specific coronavirus, we discovered that it travelled via water droplets, which are hundreds of thousands of times larger than a virus. Masks can't stop an airborne virus, but they can absolutely stop one that's spread via water droplets like SARS-CoV-2 (keeping with the above example, imagine a specific type of deadly mosquito only travelled within inflated balloons - now that chain link fence is suddenly much more effective at keeping them out). So the guidance on mask usage changed.

That's not a sign of corruption or incompetence, it's a sign of scientists trying to fight an emerging and unknown disease and learning as they go.

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