GUIDELINES FOR WEARING FACE MASKS
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is recommending Americans wear facial coverings made of cloth while out in public to help stop the spread of coronavirus -- though the president repeatedly called it "voluntary".
The change in guidelines signals a major shift in how officials are looking to combat the spread of COVID-19. The president, during a briefing with the White House coronavirus task force, said the recommendation is being made because of studies indicating asymptomatic people are spreading the virus.
“In light of these studies, the CDC is advising the use of non-medical cloth face coverings as an additional voluntary public health measure," Trump said. "So it’s voluntary. You don’t have to do it.”
Source: Trump says CDC wants Americans to cover faces with cloth amid coronavirus
ASYMPTOMATIC (SYMPTOM FREE) INFECTIONS
About half of people who have the coronavirus show no symptoms, according to data from Iceland, the Italian town of Vo, and the Diamond Princess cruise ship.
The data from those places is of particular interest to researchers because in those places even people without symptoms were tested – which is not the case in the U.S. and most countries, where desperately needed tests are reserved mostly for people who show symptoms.
All 3,711 passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship were tested, 712 tested positive, and of those, 331 (46 percent) have never shown outward symptoms, according to Japan’s health agency, which has also been cited by the CDC.
“Many cases are apparently asymptomatic. This is both good and bad news, because it means the virus lethality may be lower than initially thought, but also that people can unknowingly spread the virus,” Patrick T. Dolan, a virologist at University of California, San Francisco, told Fox News.
In the small northern Italian town of Vò, where Italy’s first coronavirus death occurred, the entire population of 3,000 people was tested.
“We tested all residents of Vò... including those who did not have symptoms,” two Italian researchers wrote in the Guardian. The researchers were surprised to find that “a significant proportion of the population, about 3 percent, had already been infected – yet most of them were completely asymptomatic.”
In Iceland, more than 6 percent of the entire country has been tested, by far the largest proportion in the world. Nearly half of those tests have been done as part of a “screening program," in which anyone who asks for a test can get one, even if they have mild or no symptoms.
“Of the 5,502 samples taken in the screening program between March 13-19, 50 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2... 66 percent of those individuals reported symptoms, such as coughing and body ache,” Kjartan Hreinn Njálsson, at the Icelandic Directorate of Health, told Fox News, adding that the other third had no symptoms.
Non-symptomatic people can spread the disease, but, “we know that the virus is much more likely to spread from person to person if the infected one is showing symptoms,” Njálsson said.
Source: Half of people with coronavirus have no symptoms, data shows