Thread by @Rule3O3

Emergency mini 🧵on an insane drama unfolding in St. Louis. Heard this from a pal who teaches at Wash U: 1/10

Yesterday, out of the blue, the health director (smiling below) staged a public policy putsch by imposing a mask mandate on the city. Evidently she did this without…

…consulting - maybe without even warning - her mayor, the regional heads of hospital, local presbyters & big shots, etc. This was so irregular at first people thought the order might be a prank.

Turns out it was real. Her reason for issuing the mandate was to reduce…2/10

…strain on the hospital system, which she said was foundering under a surge of respiratory illness.

Interestingly, she did not justify masking as a response to Covid only, but to flu and RSV, citing case increases of 50% and 150% above the 5 year average.

Naturally this…3/10

…freaked people out even more, because linking mask mandates to bugs other than Covid implied they might never go away.

The peasants would’ve revolted, but they didn’t get a chance. The nobles beat them to it. People with titles complained, in chorus.

Could the Director…4/10

…of the Health Department, an Infectious Disease physician, really make a mistake this big, and dumb?

Why that’d be like finding out the president of Harvard is an impostor.

The hospitals made a statement: “We are not overwhelmed. So far this is a normal winter.”

Ouch. 5/10

This made it obvious she hadn’t bothered to talk to them, but had simply used the “shortage of ICU beds” copypasta from 3 years ago.

St. Louis docs must really like this gal because they helped her further into the ditch by pointing out a flaw some of you already noticed…6/10

…in her analysis:

The 5 year average includes an anomaly, winter 20-21, lowest for flu in the modern history of records.

Every normal year will be above the 5 year average until it excretes that anomaly.

Now this mistake too could have been easily avoided just by…7/10

…talking to a few members of the profession she makes policy for.

But incompetent people don’t like talking to competent ones. It’s not fun for them. Feels like being told you’re wrong all the time. Feels like not being in charge. They learn to avoid the experience. 8/10

Today the mask mandate was rescinded. Lived less than 24hrs.

To save face they let her issue an “update” that “strongly recommends” masking.

I mean, you can’t have your Health Director losing her self-confidence in the midst of a crisis she imagined.

Read more via…9/10

…this link:



10/10, that’s the 🧵ksdk.com/article/news/h…

11/10 to add a correction:

The mandate was NOT for the entire city, just public employees.

(Though that makes the idea even *less* rational, because masking 10k out of 300k in a metro area with 3m has zero chance of producing any benefit. It’s homeopathy applied to NPIs.)