COVID-19 in Oregon: Wearing masks in public

President Donald Trump said in his press briefing Friday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would now recommend that Americans wear cloth masks or other face coverings in public as a preventative measure to help slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Trump called the recommendation voluntary.

The recommendation is a reversal from previous guidelines issued by the agency, which had said that healthy people did not need to wear face coverings. The agency started to rethink those guidelines as more and more evidence showed that asymptomatic people could unwittingly spread the virus.