President Trump erroneously claimed that 85% of people who wear a mask contract COVID-19.
The president, during his town hall on NBC News, said that “just the other day, they came out with a statement that 85% of the people that wear masks, catch it.”
The claim received pushback from the moderator, Savannah Guthrie, who said, “They didn’t say that. I know that study.”
He made the same comment during his North Carolina rally earlier in the day. At that event, Trump said, “Look at all the masks. You know, they keep saying, ‘Nobody wears a mask, wear the mask.’ Although then, they come out with things today. Did you see CDC? That 85% of the people wearing a mask catch it, OK?”
Trump was citing a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that surveyed 154 people who had the coronavirus and were symptomatic and compared them with 160 people who were tested but had negative results.
Each of the people who were included in the survey were tested for the virus at one of 11 sites from July 1 to 29. The study, which was published in September, showed that 14.4% of those people said they “often” wear a mask, while 70.6% of them said they “always” wear one in the two weeks before the onset of the illness.
So, in total, 85% of the people who were included in the study revealed that they either “often” or “always” wore a mask, specifically within the 14 days prior to the illness beginning.
One of the co-authors of the study, Christopher Lindsell, co-director of the Health Data Science Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told CNN that the president misrepresented the data.
“The data suggest that among a group of patients who are already showing symptoms that prompted them to get testing for the virus, there was no statistical evidence of a difference in mask wearing behavior between those who tested positive and those who tested negative,” Lindsell said in an email. “This is very different from the question of whether wearing masks prevents you becoming infected with the virus, and it is also different to the question of how many or what percentage of people who wear masks contract the virus. The study was not designed to answer these questions.”
If half of the country were to wear masks, for example, and 85% of those people were diagnosed with COVID-19, as Trump claimed, that would mean there were more than 120 million cases. In actuality, there have been about 8 million diagnoses in the United States, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker.
