Mask-wearing is becoming increasingly politicized.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, announced Thursday that mask-wearing is compulsory in most public settings, making California the 11th state to mandate that people wear masks. Public spaces include every workspace, public transit, and any facility in which people receive medical care.
President Trump, meanwhile, has discounted the benefits of wearing a mask to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. He told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Thursday that Americans who wear masks are signaling disapproval of him. He added that his biggest problem with masks is that people fidget too much with them to be effective.
“They put their finger on the mask, and they take them off, and then they start touching their eyes and touching their nose and their mouth,” Trump said. “And then they don’t know how they caught it?”
Members of Trump’s coronavirus response committee have said that wearing a face covering helps slow the spread of the virus. Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator, said in May that the president wears a mask when he can’t maintain a 6-foot distance from others.
“I’m not with him every day and every moment, so I don’t know if he can maintain social distance,” Birx said on Fox News in May. “I’ve asked everybody independently to really make sure that you’re wearing a mask if you can’t maintain the 6 feet. I’m assuming that, in a majority of cases, he’s able to maintain that 6 feet distance.”
In May, while touring a Ford manufacturing plant in Michigan, Trump didn’t publicly wear a mask during his tour of the facility despite warnings from state officials. He told members of the press at the facility that he had been wearing a mask off-camera but took it off before greeting the press because he “didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.”
Just days before his first campaign rally since March, as more than 20 states experience high daily case increases, the Trump campaign announced that attendees will not be required to wear masks.
Trump suggested that China may have deliberately spread the coronavirus to weaken competing economies. “There’s a chance it was intentional,” Trump said in the Wall Street Journal interview.
The president stated that the United States was nearing the end of the pandemic and called testing for COVID-19 “overrated.” The U.S. has had over 2.1 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 118,000 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus resource center.
Former Food and Drug Administration head Dr. Scott Gottlieb said the states hit hardest by the latest coronavirus surge are “on the cusp of losing control.”
“The question is, can we keep this from getting out of control? This is a virus that wants to infect a very large portion of the population,” Gottlieb said Thursday morning on CNBC. “They’re on the cusp of losing control of those outbreaks in certain parts of those states. Arizona, Houston, Austin, parts of Florida certainly look very concerning right now. … These are outbreaks. We’re seeing doubling times now falling under 10 days.”
Ten states, most of them concentrated in the South and West, have recently seen new record-high, seven-day averages of new coronavirus cases. Those states are Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, and Texas.
Florida has “all the markings of the next large epicenter of coronavirus transmission,” according to scientists at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania. Due to the state’s aging population and the ubiquity of retirement facilities, “the risk there is the worst it has ever been in our projections.”
Hospitalizations, since the pandemic began in March, have totaled 12,577. The increase from Wednesday to Thursday alone was 188. New daily hospitalizations have fluctuated since May and hit a record high of 265 on May 21.
Arizona’s rate of positive coronavirus tests has risen from 15.8% on Wednesday to 16.6% on Thursday, and the percentage is likely to increase, according to researchers at COVID Exit Strategy. The state also reported a new single-day high of 2,519 coronavirus cases and 32 deaths.
Germany reported its largest local outbreak of COVID-19 Thursday, with 600 employees at a meat-processing plant testing positive, becoming the largest outbreak so far of a string of outbreaks in meat-processing plants across the country, according to the Wall Street Journal. Overall, the coronavirus epidemic has begun to stabilize in Germany, with around 300 new cases reported each day.
