In New York, the hunt for an elusive face mask is anything but easy

Who knew that masks would become this season’s most coveted accessory? Holly Baxter certainly didn’t

You're more likely to find buried treasure than get your hands on some protective gear (Getty)

We’ve been crossing our fingers for a few days now that New York’s strict social distancing laws have “flattened the curve”, and it finally seems like that might actually be happening. A couple of days ago, Governor Cuomo announced that the state appears to be “past the plateau”, as numbers of hospitalisations and deaths continues to fall. It’s strange when 500 deaths per day becomes your new yardstick for optimism, but here we are. City hospitals are now below max capacity, having been just above it for a while. Fewer ambulances go screaming past our window now than did a fortnight ago. (Though they still go by regularly and it’s hard not to feel your heart in your mouth when you see most of them have “emergency senior care” written on the side.)

The quarantine has worked, it seems. It’s now compulsory for everyone in New York to cover their face when going out and about: a law which was recently brought in, in an effort to flatten the curve even further. This is easier said than done, however. Medical masks are almost impossible to come by, so my fiance and I have been making do with scarves when venturing out for a jog or a trip to the grocery store. That lent us very little social kudos at all; people in paper masks that looped around their ears or those elusive dust particle-blocking N95 masks – signs of the coronavirus elite – would look at us like we were dirty, crazy or both as we wandered down the aisles with double-layered bandanas knotted over our nose and mouths.

We’ll now be the ones casting judgmental glances at the scarf-laden hoi polloi who haven’t worked out how to circumvent the system