Should you wear a mask amid the coronavirus pandemic? Experts reconsider their advice
Broadening the use of face masks during the coronavirus pandemic has been a big topic of discussion among experts as more is learned about COVID-19 and how it spreads.
Health experts and officials in the U.S. have said since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak that people who aren’t infected with the virus or caring for someone who is shouldn’t wear face masks. But as COVID-19 continues to spread and more is learned about it, some are starting to reconsider.
Surgeon General Jerome Adams wrote on Twitter on Wednesday that his office is asking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reconsider their guidelines on who should wear masks based on new data.
The guidelines outlined on the CDC’s website still say people who are aren’t sick shouldn’t wear a face mask unless they’re taking care of a sick person. People who are sick should wear masks when they’re around others and when going to a health care provider’s office.
The surgeon general tweeted that his office, the CDC and the World Health Organization all originally told the general public not to wear face masks based on the “best available science” they had on whether masks prevented the wearer from being infected
“But we are learning more about this disease every day,” he wrote.
He said on Good Morning America that experts have learned there’s a “fair amount” of asymptomatic spread of coronavirus. So he said his office wants the CDC to take a look at whether having more people wearing masks would prevent such transmission.
Mask wearing under review
Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, told NPR on Tuesday that the CDC is “re-reviewing” whether having more people wear masks could be beneficial.
“Obviously you can see the complexity of that, if you assume that 25 percent are asymptomatic, the only way you would do it — if you then sort of went into areas that were high transmission zones and had a significant (proportion of) individuals then wearing masks, assuming that they were infected,” he told NPR.
But he said the data on asymptomatic spread and whether masks can help is being “aggressively reviewed.”
Does wearing a mask help?
The WHO on Monday stood behind its recommendations that the general public not wear masks, though it doesn’t “criticize” the use of them.
“But there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit,” Dr. Michael Ryan, director of WHO Health Emergencies, said in a news briefing. “In fact there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly or taking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.”
‘Community-wide’ use of face masks?
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN that the White House Coronavirus Task Force is discussing the idea of “broad, community-wide” use of face masks.
“Because if, in fact, a person who may or may not be infected wants to prevent infecting somebody else, the best way to do that is with a mask,” he told CNN. “Perhaps that’s the way to go.”
But he emphasized the importance of not taking away the masks available to health care workers.
“That would be the worst thing we do,” he told CNN. “If we have them covered, then you could look back and say maybe we need to broaden this.”
Wearing a mask is ‘reasonable’
Dr. Tim Platts-MIlls, vice-chairperson of research in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, stopped short of advising the public to wear face masks in an interview with The News & Observer but said doing so is “reasonable.”
“I’m not saying everyone needs to wear a mask to the grocery store,” he told the N&O. “I’m saying it’s reasonable to do it. We know the disease has an asymptomatic phase and in some cases, people may have the virus and never feel sick.”
Mandy Cohen, secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, said in a media briefing Wednesday that masks aren’t to protect the wearer.
“Masks are protecting the world from you,” she said. “It’s not really protecting you from the world.”
The surgeon general told Good Morning America wearing a mask “can’t be at the expense of social distancing.”
“We don’t want people to think ‘Hey, I’m going to wear a face covering so it’s appropriate for me to go out around other people,’” he said. “The most important thing right now to do is for people to stay at home.”
This story was originally published April 1, 2020 at 11:19 AM with the headline "Should you wear a mask amid the coronavirus pandemic? Experts reconsider their advice."
