U.S. health authorities had discouraged healthy Americans from wearing facial coverings for weeks, saying they were likely to do more harm than good in the fight against the coronavirus — but now, as researchers have learned more about how the highly contagious virus spreads, officials have changed their recommendations.
U.S. health authorities have long maintained that face masks should be reserved only for medical professionals and patients suffering from COVID-19, the deadly disease caused by the coronavirus. The CDC had based this recommendation on the fact that such coverings offer little protection for wearers, and the need to conserve the country's alarmingly sparse supplies of personal protective equipment.
I pretty clearly remember the mainstream media and various liberal talking heads telling people not to mask up back then - mostly because the US was completely unprepared for a pandemic, and they thought they had to discourage people from buying masks to make sure hospitals would have enough.
Meanwhile, the right-wing prepper types were breaking out the N95 masks they'd stockpiled for a pandemic, warning each other COVID was much more contagious and lethal than the government wanted to admit, passing around conspiracy theories about millions of deaths in China covered up by the CCP, and patting themselves on the back for stockpiling masks before the government took them off the shelf.
Then some analyst told Trump that letting COVID spread unchecked would hurt blue states worse than red states, so he had Fox News start anti-masking talking points, and all those conservative foot soldiers put away their masks and became super spreaders for Jesus.
But yeah. During that period from like January to March 2020, the political division around COVID was basically the opposite of what it became, and I can easily believe some "rationalists" were calling bullshit on the CDC suddenly telling people not to buy masks.
Unfortunately, in the spring of 2020, the CDC was discouraging people from wearing masks, and was saying masking would do more harm than good:
I pretty clearly remember the mainstream media and various liberal talking heads telling people not to mask up back then - mostly because the US was completely unprepared for a pandemic, and they thought they had to discourage people from buying masks to make sure hospitals would have enough.
Meanwhile, the right-wing prepper types were breaking out the N95 masks they'd stockpiled for a pandemic, warning each other COVID was much more contagious and lethal than the government wanted to admit, passing around conspiracy theories about millions of deaths in China covered up by the CCP, and patting themselves on the back for stockpiling masks before the government took them off the shelf.
Then some analyst told Trump that letting COVID spread unchecked would hurt blue states worse than red states, so he had Fox News start anti-masking talking points, and all those conservative foot soldiers put away their masks and became super spreaders for Jesus.
But yeah. During that period from like January to March 2020, the political division around COVID was basically the opposite of what it became, and I can easily believe some "rationalists" were calling bullshit on the CDC suddenly telling people not to buy masks.