On April 8th, 2020, I posted this comment on Facebook:
"Over the past couple of days, I've seen a number of posts criticizing Canada's public health officials for their position in not recommending face masks. Terms like "flip-flopping", "slow to act" and so on.... To those making such posts, I have this to say:
It must be nice to be the kind of person who, when asked to make a decision about something that is completely unprecedented, and to make that decision without much information and data, it must be nice to never, ever, have made a bad call. Or to have made a decision that you might have to change later on, once you had more information.
Canada's public health people have been doing an incredible job in the face of limited and rapidly changing information. If they make decisions, they are at least based on the best data they have at the time, unlike - very unlike - some of the statements that come from the mouths of certain "leaders" in some other countries. Canada's public health people are not soothsayers or people who can see the future. They have no magical powers. They can only apply their training (which, I'm sure I don't need to point out, most of us DO NOT have), and their experience, using only the data they have available, in making decisions that will have huge implications on the lives of millions of Canadians. And for which they will accept responsibility, again, unlike certain other "leaders".
Unless YOU think you could function better in such an environment, you really need to STFU.
As for the issue at hand, face masks. The best advice we can all follow is to wash our hands, try to not touch our faces and stay away from people we don't already live with. Face masks, unless you're talking about special N95 masks, will do almost nothing to prevent YOU from inhaling the virus. Wearing something on your face might help prevent you from spreading droplets that could pass the virus on to others. But they will not allow you to revert to life as normal prior to this outbreak. Most of us do not know how to use masks properly anyway. As evidenced by people's careless actions with gloves and such, we don't seem to know how to dispose of them either. There aren't enough face masks to go around, even if they were useful in some way. Masks ARE needed by people in high-risk situations like health-care workers. Their needs MUST come first.
Honestly, people, let's not let our anal orifice get ahead of our critical thinking skills."
A year later, Facebook reminded me about that post and this is how I responded today:
"One year ago. Let's see what has changed.
Masks recommendations, I think. We now understand that they help reduce the spread of possible virus-carrying water droplets that we all exhale.
Other than that? We still have self-proclaimed "experts" insisting that masks don't work, that the pandemic is a hoax, and, more recently, that vaccines don't work, that they could change your DNA, and so on, and so on. Those "experts" weren't right back then and they're still wrong. And as millions of vaccines roll out around the world, their misinformation about terrible side-effects are also being proven wrong as well.
So where are we today? In the USA, there have been almost 560,000 deaths attributed to COVID. In Canada, about 23,000. In Brazil, where things are seemingly completely out of control, about 341,000 and increasing at over 3000 per day. But in Taiwan, 10 deaths, and in New Zealand, only 26 deaths.
Obviously, things could have been far different in some of the worst hit countries. Strong action and reliable buy-in from the public could have prevented needless deaths.
Support strong action to protect public health, listen to the science and ignore nitwits."
