Does Walmart supply sinks with soap to wash your hands? Hand sanitizer? Because that is the extent of the recommended precautions currently.
What @owlegrad said. What do you need face masks for?
ummmm... because this is an airborne virus and we are front line community workers facing community spread? fairly straightforward ......
Re-reading posts from only 9-10 months ago makes me think what an attitude change in American society came about this year.
It boggles my mind trying to understand what the CDC was thinking when putting out their initial "mask isn't necessary unless you're coughing or a caregiver" recommendation. I'm of the opinion this shouldn't have even been up for debate even back in early March. It's hard to understand why CDC didn't take the approach of: if you're not sure, recommend the conservative option - better safe than sorry. We were already receiving enough information from Asian countries who went through SARS and MERS years ago that mask use is essential, and seeing that it was working for COVID-19 again.
I'm lead to 2 conclusions:
1) They knew masks would help, but didn't give this message to the public for fear of hoarding. If this is true, I believe it's a huge disservice to the public. Be transparent and let people know the supply situation, but don't resort to propagating the higher public risk alternative as an assumption. Almost a year later, some people are still skeptical of mask efficacy - probably because of influence from the initial message.
2) They ignored the recommendations of countries who had prior experience with coronavirus epidemics and developed effective mask-wearing protocols as part of a management system, Maybe they needed more time for "irrefutable evidence" or a more dire situation before re-inventing the wheel and making a recommendation similar to that which was already in place and effective in another part of the world. If this is the case, taking the less conservative approach early on simply had consequences.
I realize some of this might prompt a "hindsight is 20/20" response, but I thought it was pretty obvious from as early as February that a mask recommendation would really help in controlling this before it goes wild. Walking around Manhattan, it's apparent that quite a few other people thought so too but at that time there was still risk of hostility to people wearing masks in public (incidents where masked Asian-American women were assaulted and harassed on the subway or street).
From this year, I really hope some policy changes take place at the highest level of disease control in the US - such as more transparency and an awareness that our health policies are not always the best in the world...and it pays to look into what the rest of the world is doing because some of it might be more advanced.
