COVID-19 was originally thought to spread through cough and sneeze droplets, but now scientists believe that just breathing or talking might be enough to spread the disease.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti suggests that all Angelenos wear masks in public to help stop the spread of COVID-19, especially since many carriers are asymptomatic.

“People are infectious before they have symptoms,” Mayor Garcetti said. “So there are people out there who think they’re not sick, who everybody else thinks are not sick, but you might be a grocery clerk or you might be somebody at a pharmacy. You might have an interaction with somebody, and we want to keep them and you safe."

Through an initiative called L.A. Protects, Mayor Garcetti said the city is working with local manufacturers and apparel companies to produce five million masks a week.

“We saw Reformation, which is a local company, and hundreds of other apparel companies that came to us saying, ‘We can put our sewers and we can put our equipment to work. We can space them out, and we know that this can help.’”

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Even though the face shields aren’t medical-grade masks, they can help stop the spread of COVID-19.

"This sort of mask, when people go out, can help us minimize the droplet spread,” Garcetti said. 

While L.A. was the first big city in America to tell its residents to wear face masks in public, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends “wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies), especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.”

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