This quote from the report should be top of the list of the lesson-learned from this COVID pandemic:

> The current guidance from numerous international and national bodies focuses on hand washing, maintaining social distancing, and droplet precautions. Most public health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO) [16], do not recognize airborne transmission except for aerosol-generating procedures performed in healthcare settings. Hand washing and social distancing are appropriate but, in our view, insufficient to provide protection from virus-carrying respiratory microdroplets released into the air by infected people. This problem is especially acute in indoor or enclosed environments, particularly those that are crowded and have inadequate ventilation [17] relative to the number of occupants and extended exposure periods (as graphically depicted in Figure 1). For example, airborne transmission appears to be the only plausible explanation for several superspreading events investigated that occurred under such conditions [10], and others where recommended precautions related to direct droplet transmissions were followed.

Indoor contact, proper veneration, etc causing super-spreader events.

Meanwhile here in Canada they waited until late May to even recommend wearing a mask in such situations (other countries like the US had similar time frames and Dr Fauci openly admitted they withheld this recommendation for the benefit of healthcare workers).

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/it-s-now-recommended-that-ca...

Much like drug prohibition and other grand social control experiments, I'm not convinced the value of being vague or simply straight up not recommending masks in order to keep supply chain available for healthcare workers was ultimately worth the downside.

If supply chains was the issue then spend the government law enforcement power controlling and directing the supply chain for medical quality masks. This 4 month experiment (and I'm being generous there) where Feb, Mar, Apr and most of May they spent creating confusion and not recommending masks ultimately did more harm than good.

Now pundits and online commenters love to attack these anti-mask people when for much of the year expert sources were far from making masks the recommended choice. Including gov-delivered misinformation about their utility in order to explain themselves.

If the pro-social control (ie, lying the public) group thinks it was really stopping the wealthy and connected from completely ignoring these guidelines, then they are lying to themselves. As always with these gov poppet-mastery policies the only losers were the lowest common denominator poor people. Plenty of which still don't funny trust masks.

I would have rather spent four+ months explaining the virtues of masks and explaining the supply problem honestly. Than playing catch up last minute.

The fact Asia who had adopted masks, and never spent any time lying or dodging their public on their utility, have done better than western countries is no surprise. Asian countries had masks well before COVID.

The older I get the more cynical I become about government and intelligentsia 'we know whats best', that includes withholding information (something extra popular in healthcare). All information should be as transparent as possible, regardless of fantasies of controlling it.