A lot of people was/is sewing them at home. My wife (data scientist in a normal life) made some for our family incl. grandparents and also for some neighbours. A link from a local "Etsy" [1].

The government even made an exception so the sewing supplies shops could open.

[1]: https://www.fler.cz/zbozi/oboustranna-rouska-11339514

They're making their own.

Sometimes, quite stylishly: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/president-slovakia-coronaviru...

Wow, that same article says "As a reminder, you don’t need to wear a mask unless you are sick"...

> "As a reminder, you don’t need to wear a mask unless you are sick"...

But of course, you may not know that you're sick... so wear a mask.

Mask obstructs airflow. After some hours spent without fresh air somebody gets a headache.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

A t-shirt or bandana or scarf will make an excellent makeshift mask. This is not the equivalent of an N95 mask that should be used by health care professionals, but is good for ordinary citizens in public.

Yep, especially as the main purpose of the mask is to protect you from potentially infecting others. Asymptomatic carriers are a huge problem for the coronavirus pandemic - people might be spreading it without knowing and might only get ill much later.

By using even a very rudimentary mask, the infected droplets have it much harder to get out to other people and to contaminate surfaces. Also you are less likely to touch your face, so less hand contamination & thus less surface contamination.

Of course this only works if everyone has a mask, but given how easy it is to make simple cloth masks I think this is a fully reasonable requirement.

Try aliexepress

> Try aliexepress

I'd be surprised if that worked at all. At least one Chinese ecommerce website is preventing foreign IPs from even viewing item listings for masks. When you try to view the item from the search results, it gives you an error saying something like export is prohibited.

Also China has pretty much shut down air travel to the country to prevent "imported cases," so air freight capacity from is greatly reduced: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/world/asia/china-virus-tr...:

> The halt to almost all international passenger flights in and out of China will make it even harder for other countries to import N95 respirators, disposable surgical masks and other personal protection gear from China for their own doctors and nurses. About half the world’s airfreight typically moves in the bellies of passenger aircraft, while the rest travels aboard air freighters.

> Previous, large-scale cancellations of passenger air services to China have already created an acute shortage of air cargo capacity over the past two weeks.

> About half the world’s airfreight typically moves in the bellies of passenger aircraft, while the rest travels aboard air freighters.

Turns out we can just keep those passenger aircraft flying.

https://www.wired.com/story/airlines-use-empty-passenger-jet...

> But Monday afternoon, Delta said it’s putting an unspecified number of passenger jets back in the air, flying out of 13 American airports and to 70 destinations overseas. Delta’s not selling any tickets for those planes, however. Rather, they’ll be operated by Delta’s cargo arm, running charter flights to cater to anyone who needs to move a package or pallet.

I ordered a number of masks yesterday from Aliexpress. It works. Shipping is slower than usual, but not crazy.

Can you really say it works until you've actually received them? What masks did you order by the way?

Well, I ordered some a couple weeks ago and got them as well. Been distributing them to neighbors.