Plus, bureaucracy at work:
It is a matter of orthodoxy at the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) that surgical facemasks are a no-no as far as the public are concerned. Officials have long taken the view that paper masks do not protect against viruses and do not hold emergency stocks of them.
That thinking, like so much else, is now being tested. On Tuesday, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) – a long standing ally of Whitehall in the no-mask camp – was reported to be about to change its advice. Surgical masks should be used, not for personal protection, but to protect others from Covid-19, it was expected to announce.
It’s another virus-fighting lesson that has been borrowed from the east and raises important questions. Might population-wide use of face masks have slowed the spread of the pandemic in the west? And were our public health officials asking the wrong question all along?
I first thought about face masks at around 4pm on Wednesday, November 28, 2007, when a small but agitated civil servant flung open the door of my office shouting, “Take it down! Take it down!”. I was editing the NHS website and we had just published a story which suggested that face masks had helped bring the 2003/4 Sars epidemic under control in south east Asia.
The official was part of the DHSC’s pandemic planning team. She was very angry and wanted the story taken down immediately. She had just been to see the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and had explained to him, “in terms he could understand”, that there was really no need for the UK to hold a stockpile of masks, she said. The story we had just published threatened to undo all of that by giving credence to an “minor academic paper” which said the opposite. I told her to hop-off.
Good.