C.D.C. Recommends Wearing Masks in Public, but Trump Says: ‘I’m Choosing Not to Do It’
3 min readPresident Trump said at his daily White House briefing on Friday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that Americans use basic “nonmedical, cloth” masks.
“You can do it. You don’t have to do it. I’m choosing not to do it,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s only a recommendation.”
The Trump administration had been deeply divided about whether to urge all Americans to wear masks when they leave their homes, with White House advisers and public health officials engaged in a debate that had stalled a public announcement that using them could prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
Still, Mr. Trump said he would not wear one.
“Somehow, sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I just don’t see it,” he said. Mr. Trump stopped receiving foreign dignitaries weeks ago because of the crisis.
But some White House officials resisted, according to a top C.D.C. official who saw emails from people in the West Wing.That had some C.D.C. officials worried because the virus has already spread, largely undetected, to most parts of the country. Wearing masks everywhere, including in places where cases of the virus have not already spiked, could help slow the rate of infection significantly, some C.D.C. 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.
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 is all right to abandon social distancing and return to public life as long as you are wearing a mask. Mr. Trump made the distinction that the C.D.C. 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 on 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.
