It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday, April 2nd.

The mayor of L.A. now says everyone out in public in his city should wear a mask. Should that policy be nationwide?

For non-health care workers, the World Health Organization, and in this country the Centers for Disease

Control, say that only someone who is sick or a person caring for someone who is sick and

unable to wear a mask should wear one themselves. But there is a growing mask for all movement in America

now. And Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci from the president's coronavirus response team

now acknowledge the CDC's policy is under review. Here's Dr. Fauci yesterday on CBS.

In a perfect world, if you had an unlimited supply of masks, which we don't, if those individuals

could possibly be spreading infection and not even knowing it, a potentially good way of

preventing that, it's not 100% for sure.

We know from studies that masks are not 100%, but we don't want the perfect to be the enemy

of the good in doing something that you could have an impact in preventing transmission.

We don't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good in doing something that could have

an impact in preventing transmission.

That was preceded, however, and this is

important, by a very big, don't take masks from health care workers on the front line who need

them far more than the rest of us, message from Dr. Fauci. So where does that leave us? Well,

one thing that's clear, the N95 respirator masks should be donated to

hospitals for frontline health care providers, and maybe those commercially available surgical

masks, if you have a lot of them, should be too. Folks hoarding those are contributing to the

shortages that hospitals and the health care workers on the front lines with intense exposures

are experiencing. So the president offered this suggestion in that press briefing on Tuesday.

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