A RANT ON MASKS

Here we are at Groundhog’s Day. Pfffft! – and January was gone just like that! [snaps fingers] I think it’s a given that we will have more winter.

Early in the pandemic, sewists everywhere were encouraged to make masks due to a shortage of the N95 respirators used by medical care providers. I was skeptical that those homemade cloth masks were worth the effort. The facts were that only the N95s (and the like) were close to effective, but because those weren’t available, we thought that any mask was better than no mask. Sewists quickly made masks and delivered boxes of them to hospitals, but I figured most of those would eventually be tossed. I was optimistic that materials and recommendations for construction would soon improve.

When it became obvious that we would need face coverings, I made a few cloth masks for our personal use, and then we ordered a few that we liked better. I intended to make more, and I have a project bag which contains a mask template, a fabric panel to make ten masks (now priced to clear everywhere), metal nose pieces, and elastic, not to mention lovely machine embroidery designs specifically for masks. However, making masks is at the bottom of my “UFO” project list because I’m still uncertain of their effectiveness.

On a recent newscast , a pandemic expert said that cloth masks are known to be ineffective. Only the N95 respirators are effective, he said. And even though I knew this, I ranted to Mike that this expert had no right to say that publicly when for two years most of us have worn cloth masks out of necessity, believing that they were good enough when combined with social distancing.

The next day, the White House announced that they would release 400 million N95s to the public. Researching, I found that the N95 is available at retail outlets. It’s considered a single use mask, but if you have to, you can use it up to five times, they say, and okay – you can carefully wash it, but only if you have to. And – they are expensive. (I recommend you do your own research. Things tend to change.)

Furthermore, I was angry because we haven’t really been fooled about masks. We read the stats on effectiveness and did the best we could, but early on, couldn’t we have come up with viable, affordable solutions – better masks, better fabric, filters for the cloth masks, etc.?

Well, this is a useless rant. Most rants are. Where I live, people are lax about the mask mandate anyway. For that matter, we see sports fans packing themselves into stadiums, which, masked or not, seems like a recipe for disaster. Lest you think the Covid virus is not a thing now, one of our sons, vaccinated and boosted, tested positive just last week. KW