(Newswire.net— July 20, 2020) — Wearing protective masks has become an extremely political issue in the United States, the Guardian reports.
US President Donald Trump said that he would not order fellow Americans to wear protective masks in order to suppress the coronavirus pandemic.
Most of the American state governors have ordered the obligatory wearing of masks in the open, emphasizing that it cannot be a matter of personal choice.
Trump, who previously resisted wearing a mask himself, wore a face mask in public for the first time last weekend. However, he told Fox News on Friday night that he did not agree with the obligatory wearing of masks, emphasizing that people “must have certain freedoms.”
Earlier this week, however, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called on people to wear masks in public.
U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci appealed to state and local leaders to influence people as much as possible to wear masks.
“Wearing masks is really important and we should all use them,” Fauci said.
Whether local governments should mandate obligatory mask usage has become a divisive political issue. Polls show a majority of Americans wear masks when out in public, but a recent Pew Research Center poll found Democrats were more likely to say they wear masks than Republicans.
In the last 24 hours in the United States, 930 people died from the consequences of coronavirus infection, bringing the death toll to a total of 142,080.
The United States is still the country with the most registered infections and deaths from COVID-19. The data shows that in the last 24 hours, the number of infected people increased by 72,743, which is a record number of newly infected people. In the United States, 3,771,101 people have been infected with the coronavirus so far.
New York, despite a declining trend in the number of new infections and deaths on a daily basis, is still the most affected federal state in the United States. Namely, 432,412 people have been infected with coronavirus in this state so far, while 32,535 people have died as a result of the infection.
It is followed by California with more than 374,000 infected and Florida with close to 328,000 infected.
In the United States, 46.6 million tests were performed for the presence of coronavirus, while the number of people who have successfully recovered has exceeded 1.7 million.