I’ve been commuting this week and it’s interesting seeing New Yorkers settle into regular mask wearing (on my route, folks are at about 95% compliance). And it’s made me think about the utter failure of leadership at the highest level, with COVID in general & masks specifically.

In the early days of the pandemic, as we all know, there was a vacuum of info at the top. The CDC told us to leave the PPE for the medical professionals, and masks wouldn’t make a difference anyway, so don’t bother. Lots of us knew better and got to work making them.

In those early days, with zero information coming from the top, the crafters and sewers did their best to figure it out for themselves.

In the costume groups I’m in, people were doing deep dives for mask research, sharing info they found about the effectiveness of various materials, brainstorming ideas of what we could use as filters, etc.

Last week my husband read me some info from a scientist about most effective materials for mask making (which I already knew because the costume folks had been on that research weeks ago). The scientists recommended “quilting” and “silk.”

Okay, obviously they don’t mean “quilting” because that’s the fuzzy fluffy stuff inside quilts. I figured they meant quilting cotton, the fabric you use for the outside of the quilts.

Makes sense as it’s a tightly woven, thin cotton. That’s what I made all my masks out of. Bonus: it comes in an endless array of colors and patterns!

But silk? It’s clear no one in that room of scientists thought to reach out to a textile specialist, or even your basic home sewer. Because silk is a fiber, not a weave. There are a million silk fabrics out there, ranging from the thinnest silk gauze to heavy silk brocade.

All are 100% silk. They are light years away from each other in weight and functionality. These scientists don’t know the vocabulary, which is fine, I don’t know their vocabulary either.

So why wasn’t a textile person in the room? Imagine for a moment having effective leadership at the federal level when this pandemic descended on us.

The CDC said they recommended against mask-wearing because they didn’t want the public to buy up all the PPE the medical personnel desperately needed. Fair enough, but why was nothing else done? What if the president had assembled a mask task force?

Heath and infectious disease experts, those scientists who studied the effectiveness of various fibers, textile experts to translate those findings into what’s actually available on the market, and sewers to weigh in on various construction methods.

The government could have issued “best practices” for making homemade masks. Start with ideal mask materials, and then go down a list of what people might have lying around their house, in a descending order of effectiveness.

They could have put patterns and instructions up on the COVID dot gov website (don’t you wish we had that website?). A mask pattern for experienced sewers who own a machine, all the way down to what to do if you can’t sew and don’t own a needle and thread.

And for folks who couldn’t manage that, the government could have pointed them towards Etsy, where hundreds if not thousands of people are selling masks. Bonus: they would be helping out sewers trying to support themselves through this.

Maybe even start a nationwide database of mask makers, so you could enter your zip code and find a stitcher in your neighborhood to buy from. There are more home sewers than you might think. They could have mobilized that army!

That army ended up kind of mobilizing itself, as home sewers started cranking out masks by the thousands. But there was no centralized leadership. It could have been much more effective and targeted to where the need was greatest.

In short, there was a way to handle this that would have made mask making and mask wearing America’s new Victory Garden, your civic and patriotic duty, something all of America could get behind. Imagine where we’d be now if that had happened.

Instead we were left in the dark. Stitchers were doing their own research, unsure of what was right and wrong. We lost months when all of America could have been taking effective steps to shut this thing down.

Instead, 130,000 are dead and counting, and Trump still won’t wear a mask because he’s too fucking vain. So vote in November, please, for the guy wearing a mask.