Brosseau is very knowledgable in terms of the science behind masks. She is much less of an expert in the science of how viruses are transmitted, and she and many others have been caught with their pants down by covid 19. In March, CIDRAP published this piece by her, which was essentially saying that we dont know that covid 19 is NOT transmitted through the air:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/03/commentary-covid-19-transmission-messages-should-hinge-science At the end of the piece she says that it is ok that we dont have evidence one way or the other. She also says that policy should be driven by science. Unfortunately for Brousseau and CIDRAP, policy cannot always wait for science. Policymakers frequently have to make decisions based upon inconclusive data, in the absence of scientific certainty. This was the point Rand Paul was making to Tony Fauci the other day, and which Fauci completely agreed with: scientists don't get to make policies unless they are elected. A lot of policy has very little science to back it up, but there needs to be a policy, so one is created. When COVID 19 started, no one recommended masks for the public -including the CDC. In retrospect this seems to have been driven by the fact that there was no proof of airborne spread and there were not enough masks for the general public. There were not even enough masks for people who work in hospitals. The major policy organizations wanted to discourage mask hoarding by the public. So the big organizations and their experts emphasized the lack of evidence for airborne transmission to make the case that the public should not wear masks. But using science to justify that policy was a mistake, because, as Brousseau herself said: there is no good science to justify the public not wearing masks. They should have simply said "there are not enough masks and we need to save them for healthcare workers, so for now we dont recommend the public wear them. " It turns out covid 19 is transmitted very readily by the general public to each other by airborne routes, and the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence for absence (of airborne transmission). Several papers have emerged since March detailing outbreaks in restaurants in China, choir practices in Washington state and now the aerobics class in Korea where the virus was clearly spread through the air without any close contact at all, to 3/4 of the choir from a single person in that outbreak and to over a hundred aerobics students by infected instructors in Korea. So now the recommendations are changing - again despite the lack of conclusive scientific evidence. It is clear the virus spreads through the air, particularly indoors. We still dont have high quality evidence that surgical and cloth masks prevent transmission, but there is pretty good evidence that they trap the particle sizes of interest and decrease the amount that escape into the air when people exhale. So there is some reason to think masks are helpful, and because airborne transmission has now been extremely well documented among members of the public, pretty much all of the experts that were so against masks for the general public are having to backpedal on their previous policy statements, including the CDC itself. The countries that have done the best at containing this outbreak all have universal mask wearing. Increasingly everyone in the scientific community is admitting that our previous understanding of transmission routes for respiratory viruses was completely inadequate, based on outdated evidence and now we have to modify our thinking and our policy to deal with the reality before us. I cannot guarantee scientifically that surgical masks protect other members of the public from Sars CoV 2. But I am willing to wear a mask in public, because it doesnt cost me anything and because it looks increasingly likely that it might be an important part of how we as a society control this disease and get back to something closer to normal. On Thu, May 21, 2020, 11:11 AM Max Dillon via Mercedes < mercedes@okiebenz.com> wrote: > > https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/mask-use-rises-dramatically-evidence-their-effectiveness-sparse-and > > Lisa Brosseau and Margaret Sietsema are both experts on respiratory > protection and infectious diseases who have taught at the University of > Chicago (Brosseau is retired). On Apr. 1, they published a paper[ > https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commentary-masks-all-covid-19-not-based-sound-data] > for > the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in which they stated > bluntly: "We do not recommend requiring the general public who do not have > symptoms of COVID-19-like illness to routinely wear cloth or surgical > masks." > > Max Dillon > Charleston SC > > _______________________________________ > http://www.okiebenz.com > > To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ > > To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: > http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com > > _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
