<![CDATA[Coronavirus: Some US local governments order public to wear masks]>
Some US local governments are taking the initiative to mandate their citizens to wear face coverings in public, as national and global health organisations signalled they were re-evaluating their advice on wearing masks for non-health care workers.
Starting on Saturday, San Diego county in southern California will become the first municipality in the state to require members of the public to wear a face covering when their jobs bring them into close proximity to others.
The move follows a growing movement to encourage people to wear masks in the state and across the country. California this week became the first state to officially acknowledge that among the general public wearing a face covering could help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, releasing new public health guidelines to that effect.
Already mayors in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area had begun encouraging their citizens to wear face coverings when conducting essential business in public.
According to the new order in San Diego, all employees who may have contact with the public in any grocery store, pharmacy, convenience store or gas station must wear a cloth face covering.
The World Health Organisation on Friday said it backs government initiatives that require or encourage public wearing of masks, marking a major shift from the previous advice against almost all public uses of masks amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
The WHO added that surgical masks should be reserved for medical professionals, while the public should use mainly cloth or home-made masks.
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the White House on Thursday each signalled that they were re-evaluating their advice on wearing masks.
Until now, the US government and major health organisations had been staunchly opposed to widespread mask wearing fearing that the public would horde medical-grade masks needed by beleaguered health care workers, and that masks could give the public a false sense of invulnerability to the virus, leading them to flout strict social distancing restrictions.
The more sceptical take on masks in the West is sharply at odds with countries in Asia, where mask-wearing is ubiquitous. The Czech Republic and Slovakia have also made mask-wearing mandatory.
The local approach to mask guidance in the United States is representative of the country's patchwork response to coronavirus overall, where the response to the rapidly spreading virus varies from state to state and even town to town.
In Texas, Laredo " a town of about 260,000 on the Mexican border " announced it would fine people over the age of five up to US$1,000 if seen in public without a face covering of some kind.
All of the new guidance around face coverings have been careful to stress that nobody who is not a front line responder or medical personnel should be wearing medical-grade masks " either surgical masks or N95 masks " as those are still desperately needed by health care workers.
Instead, the public should be wearing cloth masks, home-made masks, or even improvised face-coverings like bandanas and scarves.
Announcing the new guidelines for California on Thursday, Governor Gavin Newsom stressed that masks "are not a substitute for physical distancing".
"They are not a substitute for the stay at home order," he said. "They are not a call for folks to buy N95 masks and surgical masks, pulling them away from ... our first responders."
Additional reporting by Stuart Lau
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This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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