Nonetheless, many conveyed an exaggerated level of certainty about efforts to contain the virus. This has prompted some to follow his advice, but the cost of public trust has been high.
In early 2020, public health officials said masks were not necessary. Later, he asked the public to remove the mask, sparking a debate that is still raging. In 2021, he promised that vaccines would end the pandemic through herd immunity. When the pandemic did not end, many skeptics opposed to vaccination felt justified. And now, in 2022, they are reassuring us that those at high risk can rely on one-way masking with N95 masks, while the rest of us can go without – except for a few, especially children. , are baffled as to how best to avoid the deadly disease that is still very much around. The result has been confusion and polarization.
The desire to give certainty to people is understandable. The message delivered with conviction is compelling. When public health officials began supporting universal masking, saying it would save hundreds of thousands of lives, a lot of people listened. We might have been less compelled to tell the truth: It wasn’t clear what cloth masks would be needed, but it might have helped a little. However, it may be better to build trust in the long run.
What will happen when the next wave arrives, whenever it is? As political scientist Michael Bang Petersen of Aarhus University told me in an earlier interview, people don’t mind sanctions when they are meaningful. But if there’s another wave, people can’t take faith in meaning. At this point they want practicality, consistency and transparency.
Epidemic waves have often been attributed to policies or human behavior. The media has played a role in this, saying that while cases were low, the epidemic was “under control” or that we were “making progress.”
When matters fell, it was not because someone was in control.
“I’ve never been able to figure out why we see these waves and these waves,” says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “We have no clue why they go up or why they come down.”
Osterholm is one of the few scientists who has resisted the urge to do asanas. He is horrified by the mystery of the waves of the pandemic. If, he said, scientists are rewarded in heaven with answers to the mysteries of the universe, they will be the subject of their most important question. “I don’t care about black holes. I don’t need to understand gravity. I just want to understand what’s going on here.”
The delta rose and fell rapidly in India and the southern United States. In the UK it had a different pattern: a rise, a partial decline and a plateau. It had a delayed rise and plateau over much of North America until Omicron changed everything again.
Osterholm doesn’t think the differences have anything to do with masking policies. In his view, the CDC never had any idea whether asking everyone to wear a cloth or surgical mask would make much of a difference. He attributed the sudden change in agency to an activist group called Mask4All dismissing the need for masks in spring 2020. They released a model in April of that year, starting with the assumption that cloth masks were highly efficient at preventing asymptomatic infected people from spreading disease to others, then concluding that universal masking could save hundreds of thousands of lives. Will go
It was a powerful argument – but it was built on an assumption that had not been tested. Other studies on masking followed, Osterholm said, but the results are conflicting and many were poorly done. “The amount of bias and confusion and all these issues that would make them almost incomprehensible.”
Osterholm said the airborne nature of the disease means a room can easily fill with infectious air when everyone is wearing loose-fitting clothing or a surgical mask.
“The saying that a cloth face covering or a cloth mask will protect you is not based on any science,” he says. It is also unclear whether cloth masks protect others, despite the plethora of signs saying, “My mask protects you, your mask protects me.”
This doesn’t mean that masks don’t work at all – it’s a fallacy raised by anti-mask activists. He added that N95 respirators or their equivalents can have a stronger protective effect. Emphasizing that earlier – this has been known for years – may have motivated people at greater risk to adopt them instead of unproven cloth masks.
Public health officials were also overly optimistic when they promised that vaccines would end the pandemic. The problem wasn’t anti-vaxxers – it was that the virus was evolving into new forms. Osterholm suggested last summer, soon after the vaccine became available but before the delta surge, that the darkest days may be ahead. That doesn’t mean the vaccines don’t work—disproportionately killed by delta and omicron waves—but it does mean that the vaccines don’t work well enough to end the pandemic, even. that even in places where more than 80% of adults were vaccinated.
Partition has been the result of the attitude of public health leaders. People blamed each other, believing that Covid would be behind us if not for those anti-vaxxers and people who cheated the mask rules; Or, on the other hand, that the epidemic was presented as wildly exaggerated, a kind of hoax. Osterholm likens the splits in families to the rifts that tore members of both sides of the civil war.
The US must do much more to fight the pandemic, including improving vaccines, improving treatments, and improving rapid testing so that people who are infected can get antiviral drugs more quickly. (Osterholm doubts that today’s rapid tests are accurate enough to be used for this purpose—there are too many false negatives.) But we also need one more thing: more journalists, scientists and public health officials to acknowledge that. For that how much they still don’t know.
Never miss a story! Stay connected and informed with Mint.
download
Our App Now!!