President Donald Trump and the administration’s public health officials recommended that Americans wear masks when necessary, to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
“They can have their own guidelines, but they go by the CDC guidelines and right now, that’s saying ‘wear a mask,’ and that’s OK with me, that’s good,” Trump said, referring to recommendations by health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Asked whether he would “urge Americans to wear a mask,” Trump replied, “If it’s necessary, I would urge them to wear a mask, and I would say follow the guidelines.”
“We are not defenseless against COVID-19,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said. “Cloth face coverings are one of the most powerful weapons we have to slow and stop the spread of the virus—particularly when used universally within a community setting. All Americans have a responsibility to protect themselves, their families, and their communities.”
In an online interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Redfield said that if all Americans wore a mask, the rising cases of COVID-19 could be under control in a matter of weeks.
“I think if we can get everyone to wear masks right now, we can bring this under control within four, six, eight weeks,” Redfield said.
“Covering mouths and noses with filtering materials serves two purposes: personal protection against inhalation of harmful pathogens and particulates, and source control to prevent exposing others to infectious microbes that may be expelled during respiration,” the authors wrote.
The authors noted that while the wearing of facial coverings is becoming more prevalent, they said there has been resistance. They acknowledged the objections to mask-wearing, including that homemade cloth coverings may be inferior to commercially produced ones, as well as the lack of research definitively proving the benefits of wearing masks.
Noting the difficulty of carrying out community-based randomized trials or even laboratory studies due to the challenge of handling a dangerous biosafety level 3 pathogen, the CDC urged wearing masks on the basis of a “precautionary principle.”
“In the absence of such data, it has been persuasively argued the precautionary principle be applied to promote community masking because there is little to lose and potentially much to be gained,” the CDC said. “In this regard, the report by Wang et al provides practical, timely, and compelling evidence that community-wide face covering is another means to help control the national COVID-19 crisis.”
“At this critical juncture when COVID-19 is resurging, broad adoption of cloth face coverings is a civic duty, a small sacrifice reliant on a highly effective low-tech solution that can help turn the tide favorably in national and global efforts against COVID-19,” the CDC argued.
