COVID19: Shortage of elastic bands for masks

Mobilization for artisan masks

Many independent seamstresses have decided, alone or in a group, to make protective masks out of fabric, against the COVID19 virus. The problem? More elastics on sale…

Cruel lack of elastics

It is in a village in the South-West that this small Vietnamese pastry shop opened. His manager, Quyen, no longer wearing a mask. “I opened in October 2019 and I put on a mask. You know, with us, this is very normal because our country is very polluted. So, it's almost cultural, anyway, normal to wear it regularly.” She explains that she was already putting on a mask before confinement and passing customers asked her the reason. “I could see they were embarrassed, therefore, I removed it.”

Then, the time for containment has come

Quyên had to close his business and take the measure of this confinement

The closing of shops, restaurants, cafés, cinemas and discos has been decided by the government for entry into force on Saturday night 14 at Sunday 15 March until Monday 11 May (Sunday 10 March included). […]

Containment measures aimed at limiting the spread of the COVID19 coronavirus in France.

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000041723302&categorieLien=id

Without elastics, no masks

The day this trader chose to resume her activity, she no longer had masks! Nowadays, she is still looking for some. The few customers who enter his pastries and bread depot business, today wonders why she is not wearing the protective mask, one of the recommended barrier measures.

Seamstresses without elastics

Sylvie, a seamstress from the same Gironde village, sewed a few dozen masks: “For me, my family and friends, she says, but now I'm stuck… for lack of elastics.” Indeed, closed haberdashery, supermarket shelves robbed, no more elastics are accessible. “I ordered some, but I'm waiting for the package, I don't even know if I will receive it, maybe they are out of stock!”

Desperately elastic search for masks

And for good reason, elastics in industrial quantities were made in China… Therefore, patience is the mother of all virtues, but will health and precautions wait until the day when, finally, France will realize that depending on other countries is not a solution? Pay essential and simple products at low cost, while in France it is possible to roll up your sleeves to achieve a minimum of autonomy, is a roof.

System D does not compensate for the lack of elastics

“It is always possible to cut sleeves of cotton T-shirts: the diameter corresponds to the length of a fastener. As I don't throw anything, entrusts us with this sewing teacher in a professional high school in eastern France, I collect the jacket cords, shoelaces, which are less painful to wear than rubber bands.” And she sews, she aligns rows of masks. “It’s very little, but we do with” she says, modest and proud at the same time.

France: a country of law, privileged

We have the right to ask ourselves certain questions: are our leaders playing the game? When the time comes that France and the French will realize that they are capable of manufacturing quality products without dependence? When will the French wake up from this administrative torpor which prevents them from having ideas and above all from carrying them out? What are their concrete objectives? Why the inhabitants of this free country, who does not know big climatic vagaries, are they so cautious when it comes to taking initiatives?

There will be a before, and, one after COVID… What lessons will the French government draw from it?

Valérie Doulevant