American President Donald Trump has said wearing face masks should be voluntary.
American President Donald Trump has said wearing face masks should be voluntary.
America's Centres for Disease Control and Prevention recommends people wear masks - but President Donald Trump says he will not.
"You can do it. You don't have to do it. I'm choosing not to do it," Trump said. "It's only a recommendation."
He stressed that medical masks should be reservedfor health care workers and that masks are not a substitute for social distancing.
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The Trump administration has been deeply divided about whether to urge all Americans to wear masks when they leave their homes. The deliberations, playing out as officials in cities including Los Angeles and New York have recommended residents cover their faces, reflect how health experts and government officials are trying to keep pace with the evolving science and public opinion surrounding a novel virus.
Top officials at the CDC have been pushing for Trump to advise everyone — even people who appear to be healthy — to wear a mask in public. But some White House officials resisted, according to a top CDC official who has seen emails from people in the West Wing. The official said that people around Trump pressed him to limit the mask-wearing guidance only to people in "areas of widespread transmission".
That had some CDC officials worried because the virus has already spreadto most parts of the country. Masks could help slow the rate of infection significantly, some CDC officials believe.
The issue took on greater public urgency this week, when officials said that as many as a quarter of those already infected may show no symptoms but still contribute to "significant" transmission.
At a WHO briefing on Friday, Dr Michael Ryan, executive director of the health emergency programme, said that although the agency still recommended masks only for frontline health workers and those who are sick or caring for the sick, "we can certainly see circumstances in which the use of masks, both homemade or cloth masks, at community level may help in an overall comprehensive response to this disease".
Some officials fear that a broad recommendation that Americans wear masks would raise demand for supplies that are already dwindling, or inadvertently signal that it's all right to abandon social distancing and return to public life as long as you are wearing a mask. Trump made the distinction that the CDC was recommending nonmedical, cloth masks for the general public.
"We don't want people to feel like, 'Oh, I'm wearing a mask. I'm protected and I'm protecting others,'" Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus response, said Thursday.
Evidence for the use of face masks in limiting the spread of the virus has been mounting. In a study published Friday in the journal Nature, researchers found that flat surgical face masks significantly reduced the number of virus-carrying droplets that mask wearers released into the surrounding air.
