Yasmin Tayag

The fear of breakthrough COVID-19 infections spoiled the summer. In the early days of vaccine bliss, many Americans had thought that the shots were a ticket to normalcy—and at least for a while, that’s precisely what public-health experts were telling us: Sure, it was still possible for vaccinated people to get COVID-19, but you wouldn’t have to worry much about spreading it to anyone else.

Every time I leave my apartment, I grab a mask from the stack by the door. After all these months of pandemic life, I’ve amassed a pretty big collection: Some are embroidered, while others bear the faded logos of the New York Public Library or the TV show Nailed It. What all of them have in common is that they’re made of cloth.At this point, cloth masks are so ubiquitous in the United States that it can be easy to forget that they were originally supposed to be a stopgap measure.