Insanity!

OK, I have been avoiding criticizing the WHO on a wide array of topics. And I can still understand not wanting to make a formal position without the assistance of studies which have been reviewed and have a strong chance of being factual. But, the WHO position on masks up until this has been baffling.

I mean, it isn't as though they didn't have an informal position. They did. And it was basically "we haven't done the studies, and if you use it wrong you may get a false sense of security and contract the disease anyway".

Both statements are true.

But, it also wildly ignore the positives. ANY mask covering the nose and mouth will reduce the amount of disease released into the environment which automatically reduces the odds that anyone but the infected will come into contact with it in the first place.

Secondly, ANY mask will reduce the amount of DIRECT transmission of the disease into your respiratory system, if you happen to not be infected.

I am not making any claims here about percentages or anything like that. And while it is certainly true that mishandling a mask could lead you to getting infected. And even when you might not have otherwise, I would argue that scenario is highly unlikely. If you're wearing a mask on your face, and the disease is on it, your mask most likely came into contact with the disease while it was on your face and you either walked through air which still had a significant viral load in it. Or someone just straight up coughed or sneezed in your face.

In either case, there is disease on your mask in the first place, because it was intercepted by the mask. Had the mask not been on your face, that viral load would be on your face or in your lungs already.

So, the single biggest problem a mask might actually cause? You might go out more often, and in that fashion increase your risk.

While this seems a little harder to argue with, it really only hard to argue with because we don't know what the level of increased activity would be. But, realistically speaking, a lot of people who had no choice were avoiding wearing masks because the advice wasn't there.

And when we look at the stats on who couldn't work from home, it is also a lot of the sorts of people who rely on public transit or work in larger, more crowded environments. It is a group which is already going out at least 5 days a week for work, and likely doubling that because they likely rely on at least 2 income streams. They also still need to get essentials for their homes.

How could this have changed the impact?

As I said before; look at Japan. Or, China, or Hong Kong. Japan is still my favourite example however because they weren't anywhere near as aggressive in contact tracing as Hong Kong or as strict about lock down as China. And, yet, they still pulled off staggeringly good numbers.

I think the countries which fared the best were those whose cultural practices already made them receptive to practices like wearing masks in public. Japan's lock down was half-hearted at best and given the insane population density in cities like Tokyo and the size of the population, by all accounts, Japan should have become an epicenter. It never did. And by all accounts doesn't seem poised to become one ever. At their peak they reported fewer newer cases than Quebec did at their peak.

Let that set in. A Canadian Province with a population less than 5% of Japan's and with a lower population density in a country which was never actually declared a global epicenter of the pandemic had several days of 1k new deaths whereas Japan barely topped 700. 

Quebec had stricter lock downs than Japan.

Now, I know attempting to attribute all of this to face masks is a stretch. But, the point here is that Japan didn't go anywhere near as far with their measures as other "successful" countries. And the environmental factors were stacked against them. So, there was clearly some other systemic reason for Japan's success.

And if you doubt me, take a look at the numbers. As of today, Japan is reporting 17292 cases compared to Hong Kong's 1108 cases. HK is frequently cited as the country with the best response. Japan's population according to Google is 126.5 million people, and Hong Kong's is 7.5 million. So, based on that, Hong Kong has about 6.4% as many infections as Japan. And... Hong Kong has a population which is 5.9% the size of Japan's.

That means one thing; Japan has fewer cases per capita than Hong Kong! And from that we can draw some rather staggering conclusions. Specifically that there are things we can do that are even more effective than rigorous quarantine and contact tracing. Otherwise, it is quite hard to fathom how Japan is doing better than HK.

And sure, these numbers are close enough that under reporting, in Japan for instance, might mean a switch in who is actually leading. But, that doesn't fundamentally change the argument. The margin of error is simply not big enough to explain why Japan's comparatively lax measures didn't lead to outbreaks of the scale we saw elsewhere.

Given the reports coming in that ANY mask makes a HUGE improvement on the other hand. THAT jives with what we see in countries like Japan (and HK and China). Many people in these countries already had masks, and wore them once the outbreak hit even without a recommendation to do so. This would have lead to dramatic reductions in the early spread of the disease and helped in containment after the peak hit. And that is exactly what we are seeing.

The insinuation that wearing masks would under any circumstances make the overall results worse is maddeningly idiotic. Even without the science to make a firm statement, ALL of the anecdotal evidence. ALL reason. EVERYTHING pointed to it being better than NOT doing it.

The stance from the outset should have been "cover your mouth and nose with *something*, ANYTHING while out in public, but don't assume this makes you immune".

I mean, this is basically the same as saying cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze. Only, you don't need to ensure you have a hand/arm free to cover, worry that you're fast enough, worry about how well you covered up and you don't need to worry what you touch with your hands/arms later.