SPOKANE, Wash. — We get it: recommendations from federal health officials might seem confusing at first glance.
In response to continued concerns about the coronavirus, one question among many may remain: are we supposed to wear face masks or not?
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the answer is yes. If you're in a situation where travel is essential, but social distancing is difficult, cloth masks are now recommended for everyone.
But the answers haven't always been so clear.
During the early days of reporting cases of COVID-19, health officials with the CDC and the World Health Organization said there was no need to wear masks unless you were sick.
The WHO issued a statement at one point saying, "There is no specific evidence to suggest that wearing a mask by the mass population has any particular benefit."
The U.S Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, even tweeted during the early stages of the virus that people should stop buying masks. He went on to say supplies were short and that keeping those supplies from health officials could be damaging on a larger scale.
But as research continued to mount, health officials began to change their guidance.
On Friday, April 3, the CDC issued a new recommendation that everyone should wear their own homemade cloth face coverings, citing more than half of a dozen of new studies.
According to the CDC website, this research concludes "that a significant portion of individuals with coronavirus lack symptoms (asymptomatic) and that even those who eventually develop symptoms (pre-symptomatic) can transmit the virus to others before showing symptoms. This means that the virus can spread between people interacting in close proximity — for example, speaking, coughing, or sneezing — even if those people are not exhibiting symptoms."
Adams himself can even be seen in a video on the CDC website, demonstrating a way to properly fold your own fabric mask from home.
And Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, seems to agree with the CDC's change in perspective.
"If you go to a situation where you don't have control over that 6-foot distance, wear a mask," Fauci said. "I would recommend doing what the CDC has, I think, appropriately and correctly said."
It is also worth noting that health officials are not suggesting face masks as an alternative to social distancing, but that wearing a mask should compliment other social distancing measures that have already been taken at the local, state and national level.