Thread by @AbraarKaran

🧵1/ Sometimes when you push for an idea for long enough (#BetterMasks) & when the logic makes sense to you- but you are continuously told by other “experts” (CDC leadership) that it’s not needed; you begin to wonder if you yourself are missing something. #covid19

2/ But- the other factors at play- the political ones- make me think otherwise.

If CDC said “yes better masks are better; yes they protect you more”, they are now on the hook for getting these to people.

But- if they don’t have the bandwidth or political backing to do it...

3/ Then they can’t acknowledge it.

But- because we (many of us) pushed for #BetterMasks incessantly, they probably had to do something.

So they did a study with two masks, which worked better than one mask; two masks is easy bc it’s still on the public to figure it out.

4/ They then were still pressured to *do* something; so now millions of cloth masks are being shipped out; which is good, but unclear that this is what was needed bc people could already access cloth masks?

I’ll wait to formally comment bc I don’t know what masks these are...

5/ But I still believe that better masks like N95s, KN95s, surgical + fitters etc are fundamentally more advanced masks than most if not all cloth masks.

And I also believe that aerosols in addition to droplets are spreading this virus; high grade masks are designed for this.

6/ Whether @CDCgov or others ever get #BetterMasks to the public or not- it doesn’t fundamentally change the reality that better respiratory protection in a respiratory pandemic makes sense. For those that are still unconvinced of this, that’s your choice.

#covid19

Cc @RanuDhillon @sri_srikrishna @larmbrust @KatherinePasem1 @zeynep @ashishkjha @linseymarr @MonicaGandhi9 @j_g_allen @DavidLKeating @BhadeliaMD @jeremyphoward