Of several hundred people observed in different parts of Manhattan by AFP journalists, just under half had concealed mouth and nose.
“I am wearing a mask for the first time today,” says Mitch Cassel, 64-year-old ophthalmologist, also wearing gloves. “Health is our heritage right now”.
Nearly 50,000 people have tested positive for the coronavirus in New York (49,707), which has already recorded 1,562 deaths. The city is more than ever the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States.
Technical unemployment for a few days, Nicole Knable also wears a mask for the first time in Central Park, even if she had already covered her face to go shopping.
“It was mainly because my children asked me to do it”, explains this fashion employee, whose two children returned from their university during the confinement.
Seeing more and more New Yorkers cover their mouths and noses makes her “happy”. “I have the feeling that we take care of each other. I hope that is what will come out of it, that people will be more attentive towards others ”.
PHOTO KATHY WILLENS, ASSOCIATED PRESS
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In Stacey Lewis’s building in Midtown, we collect fabric for a neighbor who works in the Garment District, the clothing district, and has started making masks.
The inhabitants of the building have decided to give another neighbor, a nurse, the industrial masks they had bought and will now be satisfied with these creations of a new kind.
“We get to know each other in the building and with the neighbors of the one next door”, she congratulates herself while walking her dog. Wearing a mask, “it can’t hurt”.
“Conflicting messages”
In Central Park, all the joggers, many, have their faces uncovered. Difficult to run with a blocked mouth.
Delivery man for the Relay restaurant platform, Vicente is also struggling. “I’m choking,” he said. ” I can not breathe “.
It does without, therefore. “I don’t wear a mask because I believe in God and everything will be fine.”
Adam Alvaro, meanwhile, refuses in principle, even though he of course heard the mayor’s instructions on Thursday.
“I keep hearing mixed messages,” he said. “One day, I am told not to wear them and to leave them to the caregivers, and the next day I am told to wear them.”
The mayor of New York Bill de Blasio and more widely the authorities, up to the World Health Organization (WHO) or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), are paying for the sudden turnaround, after weeks spent dissuading the public from wearing a mask.
“They waited because they wanted to collect masks for health workers and prevent people from accumulating them,” argues Stacey Lewis.
“There are people who collect masks,” regrets Fazal Rehman, pharmacist in the Upper East Side neighborhood.
Every day, strangers call him to sell masks to his pharmacy, Value Price Pharmacy, for up to $ 10 each.
Fazal Rehman does not want to “make money” thanks to the distress of the people, he asserts, reassembled. “It’s beyond the mayor. God is looking at us ”.
He will receive a delivery of 300 masks on Monday, purchased at $ 2 each. He assures us that he will distribute them free of charge to his clients.
He heard the message from the mayor, of course, who suggests making his own mask, “but not everyone is going to sew.”
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