Sen. Marco Rubio has a message for people: “Just wear a damn mask.”
The Florida Republican told reporters after a Republican luncheon on Wednesday with Vice President Mike Pence that “everyone” needs to be wearing face coverings as COVID-19 cases spike in places across the country even as many states are beginning to reopen.
“The area where I think we have to definitely really surge on is nursing homes, ALFs [assisted living facilities], congregate-living facilities that have a high number of people or obviously populations of people that are high-risk, those are the places where you’re really going to cut down the death rate if you can prevent outbreaks … and that’s where I hope we focus both our testing and our prevention effort,” Rubio said, according to the Hill.
“And then, everyone should just wear a damn mask, like you guys are, like I am right now,” the senator said.
There has been a spike of coronavirus cases in Florida since the state began reemerging from its lockdown. Some cities, including Miami, have mandated that people wear masks in public, although Gov. Ron DeSantis said he is not going to issue a statewide order like what was done by Gov. Gavin Newsom in California.
“I would just encourage everyone, that’s what I said in there, to sort of become informed of the nuances of how your state is reporting. In Florida, the state tells us 20% of the COVID cases that register as hospitalizations are people that are in the hospital for something else, like a knee replacement. But they’re tested, so they tested positive,” Rubio said.
Florida, which has had a total of almost 110,000 cases and at least 3,280 deaths, hit another single-day record number of new COVID-19 infections on Wednesday.
