There’s a lot of confusion among people, and misinformation, surrounding face masks.

LaPook, March 8: There’s a lot of confusion among people, and misinformation, surrounding face masks. Can you discuss that?

Fauci: The masks are important for someone who’s infected to prevent them from infecting someone else… Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.

LaPook: You’re sure of it? Because people are listening really closely to this.

Fauci: …There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.

LaPook: And can you get some schmutz, sort of staying inside there?

Fauci: Of course, of course. But, when you think masks, you should think of health care providers needing them and people who are ill. The people who, when you look at the films of foreign countries and you see 85% of the people wearing masks — that’s fine, that’s fine. I’m not against it. If you want to do it, that’s fine.

LaPook: But it can lead to a shortage of masks?

Fauci: Exactly, that’s the point. It could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it.

Since then, the science around the novel coronavirus has evolved, Dr. Dean Winslow, an infectious disease physician at Stanford Health Care, explained in an interview with FactCheck.org.

In early March, so few patients had been tested that public health officials didn’t yet know that people could spread the virus without showing symptoms, said Winslow.

“That was just not known at that point,” he said.

Winslow noted that Fauci appeared to be making two points in the interview. He was pushing back on the idea that a mask could protect the wearer from infection, and he was emphasizing the importance of other measures, such as maintaining a distance of at least six feet between people.

Both of those things still apply, according to the CDC, which explains on its website that the point of wearing a mask “is to protect people around you if you are infected but do not have symptoms.”