President Donald Trump said Friday evening that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends that people wear cloth or fabric face coverings, which can be made at home, when entering public spaces such as grocery stores and public transit stations, NPR reports. It is mainly to prevent those people who have the virus — and might not know it — from spreading the infection to others.
NPR said the guidelines do not give many details about coverings beyond: “cloth face coverings fashioned from household items or made at home from common materials at low cost can be used as an additional, voluntary public health measure.”
Trump emphasized that wearing masks in public is voluntary and said he will not be wearing a mask, NPR said.
U.S. health authorities had discouraged healthy Americans from wearing facial coverings for weeks, saying they were likely to do more harm than good in the fight against the coronavirus — but now, as researchers have learned more about how the highly contagious virus spreads, officials have changed their recommendations.
NPR said U.S. health authorities have long maintained that face masks should be reserved only for medical professionals and patients suffering from COVID-19, the deadly disease caused by the coronavirus. The CDC had based this recommendation on the fact that such coverings offer little protection for wearers, and the need to conserve the country’s alarmingly sparse supplies of personal protective equipment.
The mask does not have to be professional-grade to offer some benefit, NPR reported. Officials say it probably shouldn’t be: The CDC recommends constructing your own cloth mask, so as to help ensure that doctors and nurses can obtain access to medical-grade surgical or N95 masks amid a widespread shortage of supplies.
NPR said the U.S. is following the lead of a number of other countries that have been urging — or outright ordering — their residents to don masks in public. The expanding list includes China and South Korea, where officials have even taken the step of distributing masks.
While the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control continues to discourage the use of face masks, some European countries, such as Austria and the Czech Republic, have told their residents to cover up their mouths and noses before entering a store, NPR said.
The mayors of Los Angeles and New York City also urged residents to do the same this week, NPR said.