While claiming being "all for masks," President Donald Trump expresses uncertainty with a national mandate for wearing masks.
Trump doubts a national mandate for people to wear masks during the coronavirus pandemic is necessary.
“I don’t know if you need mandatory,” Trump said when asked in a Fox Business Network interview if he would support a national order for people to wear masks in public.
“You have many places in the country where people stay very long distance,” Trump noted.
“But I’m all for masks, I think masks are good,” the president said, adding that he has been seen wearing one in situations where he was in a group of people.
“Usually I’m not in that position,” said Trump, who noted that “everyone gets tested [for Covid-19] before they see me.”
But “I’d have no problem,” Trump stressed. “I had a mask on, I sort of liked the way i looked.”
Trump told Fox Business that the U.S. economy is already heading for a “V-shaped” recovery – a sharp decline followed by a sharp gain – touting recent figures such as the month-to-month percentage gains in retail sales.
“I think we’re going to be very good with the coronavirus,” Trump said. “I think that at some point that’s going to sort of just disappear, I hope.”
“I think we’re going to have a vaccine very soon, too,” Trump added in the interview.
Several health experts say a national mask mandate could save lives by helping to contain the spread of the virus.
Social distancing and wearing of masks found effective in reducing COVID-19 risk, according to a study published in the medical journal The Lancet.
For face masks, the likelihood of transmission without a face mask or respirator was 17.4%. That became 3.1% when a mask was worn. Meanwhile, the certainty of the evidence was found “low.”
Masks can save economy
Financial analyst Goldman Sachs also supports a national mask mandate to save economy. The firm said it could reduce coronavirus cases and save a 5% GDP hit due to lockdowns.
Jan Hatzius, Goldman’s chief economist, announced that they studied the link between mask wearing and health and economic outcomes due to Covid-19. Results show that wearing masks can lead to sizable and statistically substantial results.
“We find that face masks are associated with significantly better coronavirus outcomes,” Hatzius wrote in a note to clients. “Our baseline estimate is that a national mandate could raise the percentage of people who wear masks by 15 (percentage points) and cut the daily growth rate of confirmed cases by 1.0 (percentage point) to 0.6%.”
“These calculations imply that a face mask mandate could potentially substitute for lockdowns that would otherwise subtract nearly 5% from GDP,” the economist added.
Lockdown efforts, according to Goldman Sach’s estimates, subtracted 17% from US GDP between January and April. The firm’s analysis showed that a face mask mandate could potentially substitute for lockdowns that would otherwise subtract nearly 5% from GDP.
“If a face mask mandate meaningfully lowers coronavirus infections, it could be valuable not only from a public health perspective but also from an economic perspective because it could substitute for renewed lockdowns that would otherwise hit GDP,” Hatzius wrote.
