This mask saved my life

Wearing one will save you too if you continue to follow CDC guidelines

I’ve got a guideline for you: buy a subscription to this brilliant Newsletter!

Do you remember what it was like a year ago?  I do.  In the first week of March, I drove over to the Springs Hardware Store and bought two packages of masks like the one I’m wearing in the photograph.  They’re normally used to protect you from dust when you’re sanding wood floors or wall joints you’ve just spackled.  That’s why I found them at the hardware store. 

Tracy and I started wearing them the day I brought them home.  We didn’t go out much, but we still had to go to the Stop n Shop supermarket once a week, and I went out every morning to the local Mexican market or the nearby One Stop Market to pick up the New York Times and maybe a burrito or sandwich for lunch.  Every time either of us left the studio, we wore our masks. 

Trump held his first press conference with members of his so-called “coronavirus task force” on February 29.  The first death from the virus had been announced earlier that day. A man had died in King County, Washington.  Trump said there were 22 patients in the United States who had the disease, and of that number 15 of them had either recovered fully or were “well on their way.”

It was the first of his upbeat proclamations about the virus, and it was a lie. Numbers were released later which showed that in fact, 59 people had the disease, 44 of them from the Diamond Princess cruise ship.  None had recovered fully or were “well on their way.”

That’s when I decided to go out and find some masks.  Trump was clearly dissembling.  The day before his news conference, he had called the virus “another Democrat hoax” at a rally in South Carolina.  His lies would multiply as he continued to hold those infernal “task force” press conferences in the White House and things got worse and worse. 

A month later, more than 300,000 people in this country had contracted the disease.  The United States was averaging 1000 new cases a day.  More than 8,000 had died in this country, with nearly 60,000 dead worldwide.  In New York City, less than 100 miles from where we live, they were preparing for the pandemic to hit a peak within seven to ten days.  They were running low on ventilators, and morgues were so full that refrigerated trucks where parked outside a hospital in Queens, the hardest hit area of the city. 

People from New York City began arriving out here on the east end of Long Island in March.  By April, it was a stampede.  The CDC finally recommended that people should start wearing cloth masks over their mouths and noses, but at the Stop n Shop, there were plenty of unmasked customers, and some people gave my mask a curious look as they passed in the aisles. 

Trump announced from the White House Press room on April 4 that “this will be the toughest week.”  Little did he know.  Little did any of us know.

Tracy and I continued to wear our masks.  Eventually, we would get some KN95 masks that were said to work better than the ones from the hardware store, and Tracy would order some well-fitting masks with multi-layers of cloth online that worked just as well.  But we never forgot to wear our masks.  It was obvious from the very beginning that the disease was spread from person to person in the air.  The disaster of the cruise ships was enough evidence of that.  And much later, in September of last year, we would learn from Bob Woodward’s book on Trump, “Fear,” that Trump had known as early as February 7 that the virus “goes through the air.” As if we needed any more evidence, we learned that he had been lying about the seriousness of the virus from the very beginning.

I’m not claiming any sort of prescience, but I will admit to being afraid for my life and for Tracy’s.  Both of us have been more susceptible to the disease due to our ages, and I have long suffered from a lung condition that put me in the category of one with a “comorbidity,” that wonderfully descriptive word.  So month after month we continued to wear our masks every time we left the studio.

We didn’t trust Trump, we didn’t trust his CDC, but we trust the CDC since Biden became president.  We’ll follow the new guidelines and go outside without our masks when we’re not around crowds of people, but those masks saved our lives, and we’ll keep wearing them everyplace the CDC says it makes sense to wear them.

The mask you see in this photo, and the ones that came after, saved my life and Tracy’s life, little pieces of pressed paper materials and cloth. I’m still here writing columns because of those masks.  They were, and are, miraculous.