Fauci: National Mask Mandate May Be Needed Amid Covid-19 Spike

Topline

While President Donald Trump continues to publicly downplay the severity of the coronavirus pandemic despite a record-shattering spike in new cases throughout the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday that “if people are not wearing masks, then maybe we should be mandating it,” marking the first time Fauci has proposed a potential national mask mandate. 

Key Facts

Key Background:

At Thursday’s presidential debate, President Trump said the U.S. is “rounding the corner” on the coronavirus pandemic (a statement he has made in some form every day for the last three weeks). At a campaign rally in Florida on Friday (the same day 85,000 Americans tested positive for the virus), the president told his supporters that the pandemic was going to “end quickly” and that “we’re rounding the turn, we’re rounding the corner, we’re rounding the corner beautifully.” In a recent interview, Fauci said that it is “absolutely essential” that the U.S. government is fully transparent with its citizens regarding the pandemic’s severity. “If you’re going to make scientific-based public health recommendations, everything has got to be transparent,” Fauci told the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. Earlier this week, Trump attacked Fauci, calling him “a disaster.” The president also claimed that Americans are “tired” of hearing about the coronavirus and “tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots.” 

Critical Quote: 

“It’s been rise after rise after rise, week after week,” said Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Nothing has been added to the mix that’s going to make things slow down.”

Big Number:

8.5 million: As of Saturday morning, more than 8,540,300 people in the U.S. have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 223,900 have died.

Further Reading:

Dr. Fauci: Not Being Transparent About Covid-19 Because ‘You Don’t Want To Alarm People’ Is ‘Totally Nonsense’ (Forbes) 

Fauci says it might be time to mandate masks as Covid-19 surges across US (CNN)

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