New York, April 16 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that he will require every person in the state to wear face coverings in public when people cannot keep six feet away from each other.
"I am issuing an Executive Order today that all people must wear a mask or face covering in public in situations where social distancing is not possible," Cuomo tweeted on Wednesday.
For example, if a person is travelling on public transit where it is impossible to maintain social distancing, or walking on a busy sidewalk, "you must wear a face covering like a bandana or a mask", Xinhua news agency quoted the Governor as saying.
Cuomo elaborated the order at his daily briefing, saying that face coverings could be worn below the chin when no one was nearby.
"You're now at an intersection and there are people at the intersection and you're going to be in proximity to other people? Put the mask on," he noted.
New York state added another 752 COVID-19 fatalities overnight, bringing its death toll to more than 11,500 by Wednesday afternoon, according to official and Johns Hopkins University's tallies.
The Governor said the state, the epicentre of the pandemic in the US, will revise its COVID-19 death toll reporting to include those who presumably died of the disease but had never got tested, a new method that New York City already took.
The death toll from COVID-19 in New York City increased by some 3,700 on Tuesday to exceed 10,000 after the city's health department worked for weeks to collect the information of those suspected cases.
The overall US death toll from the coronavirus currently stands at 30,844, with a total of 638,111 confirmed cases.
The country now accounts for the highest number of cases and deaths in the world.
( With inputs from IANS )