No, the half-year interview does not reveal the “mask conspiracy”

“A video uploaded to tv3 a few months ago … Who’s lying here now?” video shared more than 320,000 times. together.

Galina Zagrebnevienė, an epidemiologist at the Center for Communicable Diseases and AIDS (ULAC), criticizes the benefits of facial masks in the fight against COVID-19 on July 27.

“That mask, as you mentioned, did not really protect a healthy person from the entry of the virus into his body, his nasopharynx,” said G. Zagrebnevienė.

Such words were spoken by a representative of ULAC on TV3. The television channel can be detected on your YouTube account January 28 uploaded a full interview recording.

Ignoring the context

The date of the interview is extremely important. In late January, the new coronavirus was still a distant problem. Until there was one month left in lithuania for the first identified case, to the first case in Italy a few days. The name COVID-19 was given to coronavirus infection only on February 11.

There was no consensus on the benefits of wearing medical masks for a long time. Recommendations for wearing medical masks in public places. SAM released March 23., already after the announcement of the quarantine, when the number of people infected with COVID-19 in Lithuania was growing.

At that time, the mandatory requirement to “wear protective equipment (masks, respirators, or other means) covering the nose and mouth” entered into force on April 10., before the Easter weekend in anticipation of increased traffic.

For example, the recommendations of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) to encourage people to wear medical masks in public places distributed only on April 8.

There is now enough research to demonstrate the effectiveness of the masks.

The requirements for wearing masks are mainly related to limiting the probability of infection of individuals infected with COVID-19 but asymptomatic. In other words, wearing face masks is meant to protect those around them, not the wearer of the mask.

In early April David Heymann, a professor in the World Health Organization (WHO) group of experts and a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that “the masks are for the protection of others, not the user”, a unless they work in health care.

The changing situation

By not spreading the virus, In early June, the WHO reviewed the recommendations. and urged wearing masks in places where the virus has spread and where it is difficult to keep a safe distance. All this does not show a universal “mask conspiracy”, but a situation that changes extremely fast due to an illness that humanity was unaware of 8 months ago.

How BNS told the news agency on Wednesday Rolanda Lingienė, director of the National Center for Public Health (NSVC), the attitude towards wearing masks has changed along with the growing number of studies testing the benefits of wearing masks.

“At first, we did not know that some people may have no symptoms, that there are asymptomatic forms, later we also discovered that three days before the onset of symptoms, infected people clear the virus and can infect others,” Lingienė told BNS on Wednesday.

For this reason, the focus at the start of the pandemic was to inform symptomatic people about protective measures rather than encouraging them to use them en masse. With new insights, this attitude later changed.

ULAC chief Saulius Čaplinskas points out that wearing masks is also helpful for healthy people as they create a “certain barrier” when in contact with the patient.

“There is now enough research to demonstrate the effectiveness of the masks,” explained S. Čaplinskas. It was posted on Facebook at the time on January 28. During the interviews, there was no information on the effectiveness of the masks in the fight against COVID-19 because the disease was completely new.

15 minutes According to the evaluation, the presentation of a half-year video as evidence of a conspiracy to wear masks is intended to be manipulated. During a pandemic, the situation changes extremely fast, so the lack of context for information is misleading.

Remember that The government decided on Wednesdaythat face shields will be mandatory in tight spaces, it is recommended to use them until then. This decision was made in response to the situation regarding COVID-19. It is true that masks are not necessarily necessary at mass events, eating or shaving the beard.

Representatives of the monitoring authorities of the country’s information space and the SAM discourage the use of social networks as the only source of information and are particularly skeptical of any information published in the comments.

It requires the collection of data from official authorities and close monitoring of where the information comes from. The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has led to a wave of misleading information, sometimes deliberately promoted by foreign countries.

Official information on COVID-19 is provided by Ministry of Health (SAM), National Center for Public Health, European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

The publication was prepared in 15 minutes. in collaboration with Facebook A program to stop the spread of misleading news on the social network. More about the program and its rules: here.