psephophorus

“The nipples flash the SOS distress signal.”

Now my sides hurt from laughing.

I have two distinct questions. First is probably to doctors Eily and Weintraub as it concerns the border between effective communication and ethics. Since the beginning of this crisis there has been several public announcements in my country and in several other countries that wearing masks is not only unnecessary but even discouraged among general public. The reasons given are different, varying from "lets leave them to medical professionals who need them most" to Finland's "Do not wear masks, they are inefficient and home-made ones may be dangerous as you breath in cloth fibers". It seems to me that these messages are usually not clear whether they mean masks are inefficient protecting wearer from infection or protecting others from his/her (asymptomatic) infection. It is certainly harming peoples trust in their ability to use masks to avoid infecting others. Do you think this is ethical and efficient communication to suggest people not wear masks because they will not work and are even harmful? It seems to me that if this were the case, medical professionals would not be using them too. It seems to me real reason is avoiding panic-buying that reduces medical professionals' ability to acquire masks, but the real reason gets lost in messaging resulting in misinformation and reduced trust in officials' honesty or competency.

The second question is about data and privacy. We have quite a lot of digital medical information collected about each citizen in our country (Estonia). Yet privacy laws protect it to such extent that local municipalities have not been able to get information whether they have an active case in their borders or not. Only information available is to which highest administrative division is the person officially registered in (not very helpful and also inaccurate, as people often live elsewhere). Even researchers have not been able to get location data about infected cases. It is somewhat understandable, as our country is so small (1 million people) that 69 year old male in Järva-Jaani township may already be enough information to identify him by random university research assistant. In your opinion what are the effective information collecting and sharing practices that help local municipalities in dealing with a break-out of sickness but leave people's privacy protected? Currently we rely too much on overworked National Health Agency to coordinate tracking who have just one data analyst on payroll...

Thank you for your answer! It is easy to find mixed messaging even in official channels, especially when government and health agencies are entering their third month of working on overtime. Sometimes different branches have different opinions and do not coordinate. As was the case in Finland, here is summary of the confusion. Reporting by YLE (Finnish equivalent of BBC, official state broadcasting, not social media).