The wearing of non-medical face masks in public to lessen the transmission of COVID-19 in the United States was first recommended by the CDC on April 3, 2020, as supplemental to hygiene and appropriate social distancing. Throughout the pandemic, various states, counties, and municipalities have issued health orders requiring the wearing of non-medical face coverings — such as cloth masks — in spaces and businesses accessible to the public, especially when physical distancing is not possible.
Federal officials initially discouraged the general public from wearing masks for protecting themselves from COVID-19. In early April, federal officials reversed their guidance, saying that the general public should wear masks to lessen transmission by themselves, particularly from asymptomatic carriers. Public health experts such as Larry Gostin stated that federal officials should have recommended mask-wearing sooner; others noted that US government guidance lagged significantly behind mask recommendations in East Asian countries and likely exacerbated the scale of the pandemic in the United States.
President Donald Trump largely resisted wearing masks in public media appearances, and did not mandate their use at his campaign events during the 2020 presidential election. After briefly encouraging their use in mid-July, Trump continued to hold campaign events (such as the 2020 Republican National Convention) where masks were not widely used, and publicly mocked Joe Biden for wearing face masks in public appearances. After Biden was sworn in as president in January 2021, his first executive orders included mandating the wearing of masks on public transport systems and more vigorous enforcement of COVID-19-related health and safety protocols, including masks on federal properties.
In April and May 2021, as the country's vaccination program increased in pace, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued successive guidelines stating that fully vaccinated individuals did not need to wear masks or physically distance when in public. The announcement faced a mixed reception, with critics arguing that this guidance primarily relied on an honor system, and may have been premature given the country's progress on vaccination at the time. In July, due to rising cases mainly caused by the more transmissible Delta variant, the CDC issued a recommendation that face masks be worn by anyone in an indoor public space if "substantial and high transmission" exists locally. The CDC mask mandate for public transport was further extended into 2022, due to the similar threat of the Omicron variant. By late-February 2022, the CDC had adjusted its metrics for "substantial and high transmission" to account for mitigating factors, stating that masks were not necessarily needed in roughly 70% of the country. By April 2022, nearly all state-level mask mandates had been lifted, and the CDC's mask mandate for airplanes and public transport was struck down as unlawful.
Mask mandates have been divisive with attitudes generally varying along the political spectrum. Republican-led states were, initially, less likely to impose health orders requiring the wearing of masks than Democratic-led states. Several states, including Arizona, Georgia, and Texas, took actions to block localized health orders requiring masks, but later softened their stances to help control local spikes.
Timeline
2020
Early recommendations
Initially, the U.S. government did not recommend the use of face masks by the general public outside of medical settings to protect themselves from COVID-19, as to prevent shortages of medical-grade personal protective equipment (PPE) for doctors treating COVID-19 patients. In February 2020, Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams stated that proper hygiene and getting a flu vaccine were appropriate preventive actions to be taken by the public, and stated on Twitter that masks should be saved for healthcare professionals, and that they were "NOT effective in preventing [the] general public from catching Coronavirus". CDC director Robert R. Redfield also stated that healthy people did not need to wear masks.
In a March 8 interview with 60 Minutes, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Anthony Fauci similarly argued that "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." Fauci again cited the need to conserve supplies of PPE for medical workers and those who were sick.