Deborah Cohen, BBC: WHO recommended masks due to political lobbying (2020)
archive.vnFacemasks seem to be the hot button division item but that's all a distraction. Because wearing the mask, has very little downside.
The WHO argued against border closures as a method to halt COVID-19 yet nearly every country in the world did them. There reason for not having them is the economic impact that primarily impacts poorer countries that rely heavily on tourism to sustain their poor and middle class workers. Everyone fiddles with mask/no-mask but no media is even bothering to look at the economic impact and lives lost due to unadvised border closures.
N95 or P100 masks (the ones from the hardware store) actually reduce your risk almost 50%. So they obviously made the pandemic worse by pushing the useless face coverings instead.
Source? A RCT from 2019 found "no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza" between N95 and medical masks.
It is linked in the source.... https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577.long
Penetration of cloth masks = 97%
Penetration of N95 = 44%
I don't think you and parent disagree. Parent claims X=0.5, you claim X=Y.
Here's a good summary by Cochrane from 2020:
"There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low‐moderate certainty of the evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect. The pooled results of randomised trials did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks during seasonal influenza. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection. Hand hygiene is likely to modestly reduce the burden of respiratory illness. Harms associated with physical interventions were under‐investigated."
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
"The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to push an additional 88 million to 115 million people into extreme poverty this year [2020], with the total rising to as many as 150 million by 2021"
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/10/07/c...
Yes there's lots of these articles about global recession but no where in these do they mention border closures are not something supported by the WHO as a way of controlling the spread. The WHO's entire stance on lockdowns is that they should be temporary and targeted because the economic impact caused by them causes a greater impact to health. That's an inconvenient truth that the CDC and other government heath agencies aren't keen on having widely known. Thus it seems to be left out of the press.