One problem that we have faced has been trying to decide what information about the pandemic is accurate and what is not. This is not about “fake news.” It is trying to differentiate between experts holding different opinions.
Anyone who believes there is a final scientific answer about wearing a mask is in trouble. It all depends on: the type of mask, the way you handle and wear it, and its usage with other protective measures. Are we supposed to wear masks to protect ourselves from other “sick” people or to protect other people in case we are “sick”?
Your answer probably depends on which “expert” you just listened to. Read this from the University of California San Francisco if you want to hear some genuine expert nonsense.
“Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] and the World Health Organization now [July 11, 2020] recommend cloth masks for the general public, but earlier in the pandemic, both organizations recommended just the opposite. These shifting guidelines may have sowed confusion among the public about the utility of masks.”
One reason was that WHO and CDC did not think that the virus could spread quickly, having a “low disease prevalence.” That is what they said when they first changed their expert recommendation. But that was not true. UC San Francisco epidemiologist George Rutherford said this about the real reason. “The legitimate concern [of WHO and CDC] was that the limited supply of surgical masks and N95 respirators should be saved for health-care workers. We should have told people to wear cloth masks right off the bat.”
“Another factor was that culturally, the US wasn’t really prepared to wear masks, unlike some countries in Asia where the practice is more common, said infectious disease specialist Peter Chin-Hong.”
So if the white, black, and brown people of North and South America and Europe were a little more turned in to Asian mask wearing practices, they would not now be dropping dead in huge numbers from Covid. Maybe drinking baijiu, sake, and San Mig Light could also have helped.
In fairness, with the constantly developing pandemic situation with new knowledge discovered rapidly, not seeing changes in the expert advice could be extremely dangerous.
However, the first mortality estimate we mentioned in February from an epidemiology expert was 4 million global deaths within a short time. That number became a base case benchmark that was lowered reluctantly by experts slowly over time.
In his 2001 book—Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better—Daniel Gardner cites the studies made by Philip E. Tetlock from the University of Pennsylvania. “Face it, experts are about as accurate as dart-throwing monkeys. And yet every day we ask them to predict the future—everything from the weather to the likelihood of a terrorist attack.”
One commentator on the book said this: “The more hysterically that experts are shrieking about some unthinkable scenario, the greater the odds are that you can ignore it. When bad things happen to people, they are more often things that they didn’t expect rather than things they were actively fearing.”
James Callaghan, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, once said, “A leader must have the courage to act against an expert’s advice.”