President Trump said Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends that people wear cloth or fabric face coverings, which can be made at home, when entering public spaces such as grocery stores and public transit stations. It is mainly to prevent those people who have the virus — and might not know it — from spreading the infection to others.

Rural communities “tend to be older, with more chronic illness,” making people more at risk of severe Covid-19. Early this week, Kodiak Island, part of an archipelago in southwest Alaska, issued a “hunker down” proclamation, asking residents to stay at home as much as possible.

For nurses, the biggest news this week wasn’t the declaration of the COVID-19 epidemic as an official pandemic. It was the CDC’s release on March 10 of new interim infection prevention and control recommendations for COVID-19.

The White House advised all Americans to avoid groups of more than 10 and urged older people to stay at home altogether in a set of new guidelines designed to fight a spreading coronavirus outbreak.