Dr. Anthony Fauci said the United States may want to consider mandates for masks if people don’t start wearing face coverings.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, appeared on CNN Friday evening and was asked about Joe Biden’s plan to try to get the country to expand its mask mandates. Biden has said that he would “go to every governor” and urge mandates, “and if they refuse, I’ll go to the mayors and county executives and get local masking requirements in place nationwide.”
Fauci said that while critics talk about the difficulties of enforcing mandates, “If everyone agrees that this is something that’s important and they mandate it and everybody pulls together and says, ‘We’re gonna mandate it, but let’s just do it,’ I think that would be a great idea to have everybody do it uniformly.”
“One of the issues, though, I get the argument that says, ‘Well, if you mandate a mask, you’re going to have to enforce it, and that’s going to create more of a problem,’” Fauci continued. “Well, if people are not wearing masks, then maybe we should be mandating it.”
President Trump has pushed back on the idea of a federal mask mandate, and despite rising numbers of new COVID-19 cases, he has been urging states to “open up” and lift restrictions put in place earlier on in the pandemic. Fauci and other health officials have warned about this winter and the pandemic coinciding with flu season.
Fauci said in early August that new COVID-19 cases need to drop to below 10,000 per day by the fall, or the U.S. was “going to have a really bad situation” on its hands. On Friday, the U.S. tallied more than 85,000 new infections.
In total, there have been more than 8.5 million cumulative cases of COVID-19 and about 224,000 deaths in the U.S. since the pandemic first began.
