On Sunday, Florida reported the highest number of new coronavirus cases of any state since

COVID-19 came into existence. Donald Trump demands that the kids go back to school this fall,

and his administration is trying to sideline its leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

This is America Dissected. I'm your host, Dr. Abdual El Sayyad.

And today, we're talking to Dr. Fauci. In public health, public communication is one of the most

important things to get right. It's particularly hard, though, when we're actively learning about the

disease we're messaging about, leaving us changing the message over time. This was me back in March.

If it makes folks feel better to wear something that they've sewn over their mouth, fine, but I just

don't want people to be under any sense that this thing is actively protecting you, just because it's not.

Yeah, I was wrong. To be fair, I wasn't the only one.

WHL only recommends the use of masks in specific cases.

Do not buy, do not wear masks if you're healthy. People in the general public shouldn't be wearing them.

Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.

We had thought at the time that masks were at best minimally effective to preventing transmission,

largely because we didn't know that the virus could be spread by people who didn't have symptoms.

After all, most coronavirus like SARS and MERS can't be spread that way.

And we thought that a national run on masks would leave frontline healthcare workers who interact

all day with people who do have symptoms without the PPE that they needed to care for their patients.

Well, they didn't have that PPE anyway, but that's another story.

And then, science happened. And we learned that a lot of spread happens through people who don't

have symptoms at all, and that cloth masks were in fact very effective to reducing transmission.

So we did our best to course correct.

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