The CDC advice on masks reflects the fact that there simply weren’t enough of them to go around and they wanted them reserved to protecting the MOST EXPOSED people, ie., healthcare workers actually working with contagious patients, since in Wuhan it was these highly exposed people who were not just most often infected but most severely infected as well, since the “head start” the virus gets over the immune system of the body is greatly affected by the initial number of infecting virions and even young medical personnel were having their bodies overwhelmed by high titre initial infections from their proximity to all the sickees.

if you’ve ever been in the military you know that the chem warfare defense ensembles double as biowarfare protection and that you damn sure wear the protective mask yourself. That’s why EVERYONE had a mask.

But when you farm out your mask production to China and they need it all themselves and literally recall the ships carrying it in mid-ocean, you make whatever compromises in the ideal you need to to get the best result with the resources you have.

Which is why we need to take a long hard look at control of critical logistics needs once the current pandemic has eased...which they eventually all do.