> Your response is extremely frustrating.

I fully realize the manner in which I speak is frustrating, and it frustrates me that people find it frustrating (and also that it will get you throttled on HN so you have to wait when replying to posts).

I should also note that the "tone" of this message will be more of the same, because I believe speaking frankly in pedantically objective terms is useful, even if it may offend. If I was able to do it without offending I would, but that is a skill I seem to lack.

> At the time they gave this advice, it hadn't yet hit NYC, and the scope and speed of the future outbreak in the states was unknown.

Agreed. But was it unknown at the time that the stage was set for a serious global pandemic?

> in late February/early March it's more than reasonable to think that, like swine flu, the states' response would contain the outbreak to hospitals

It is reasonable to speculate that this is one possible outcome, but I do not believe it is reasonable to speculate that this is the only possible outcome, or choose to ~assume it will be the outcome that will manifest in reality and set strategy on accordingly. I believe when considering and managing risk, worst case scenarios should always be front and centre in people's minds.

> and therefore

I read this is: "and therefore it logically follows that", and therefore disagree.

> a) weren't necessary for the day-to-day

I prefer: may not.

> b) could give a false sense of protection to the people wearing them

Is this harmful? To what degree, and in what way?

Was no other messaging possible that could accommodate this detail?

> c) were best suited to be used by professionals

They may be "best" suited for professionals, but this does not mean that value can only be derived from professionals wearing them, which seems to be what was communicated.

> Of course, within two weeks, NYC was shut down and people were wearing makeshift masks and the advice was updated.

Agreed. However, a reader might implicitly infer from this statement that health officials were acting ~perfectly based on available information, when the truth very much seems to be (based on the one Fauci interview video posted here) that at least part of the motivation for the messaging to not wear masks was known to be untruthful, but was done to preserve mask supply for health care personnel. I do not object to this strategy in general, but I do object to the unwillingness to consider the value in coming clean about it after the fact - it seems perfectly plausible to me that if officials were more truthful in this way, they they'd get less blowback from conspiracy theorists and detail oriented people.

> To say that Dr. Fauci, of all people, was lying to the public instead of giving the best advice available at the time is an affront to his decades-long career of public service.

Mother Nature (and sometimes the real-world behavior of a subset of human beings) is not persuaded by emotion-based [1] rhetoric like this - she behaves the way she does, and we can choose to acknowledge that and respond accordingly [2], or we can choose to ignore objective details and live in a narrative-based fantasy land.

I believe thinking about things in this manner (meta-conversation, meta-cognition) is useful [3]. Is this not the way we think when we are doing engineering and systems analysis? Yes, managing the affairs of humans is different, but it is also similar. What is optimal is unknown, it must be discovered, like anything else humanity has achieved.

[1] affront - an action or remark that causes outrage or offense.

[2] This does not mean that we must tell citizens the truth all the time, but only that it should be acknowledged than when you deceive, you run the risk of being found and suffering consequences.

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!"

"If you tell the truth you don't have anything to remember."

I suspect there may be an evolutionary reason why such aphorisms persist across generations.

[3] not "the" "answer", but useful. Perhaps what I say here is 100% incorrect, but to know with some certainty would require actually trying it.