University of Maryland donates respirators, masks to Walter Reed, other local hospitals

The University of Maryland said it has collected and donated thousands of N95 respirators, masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment to local hospitals, including Walter Reed Military Medical Center.

The donations come at a time where hospitals and medical centers around the region and the country are experiencing shortages of PPE, and some health care workers are even staging protests because they do not feel protected when treating patients of the coronavirus.

With schools and universities closed, educators don’t need the equipment they normally would use in the course of teaching. Reuven Goren, coordinator of the scene shop at the university’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, reportedly had the idea to send six boxes of N95 masks and around 40 boxes of protective gloves to Walter Reed.

“When something big like this is going on, everybody is figuring out what they can do to help,” Mr. Goren told the university’s newsletter Maryland Today.

The university said a stockpile of 12,000 N95 respirators and 12,000 surgical masks was discovered after being purchased during the avian flu scare in the mid-2000s. The equipment was donated to the University of Maryland Medical System.

Even the department in charge of conservation for the library system has been able to step in and donate 250 N95 masks.

The department chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering is working on a way to produce masks from a blow-spun polymer in his lab at the university, and associate professors in the department have turned to making hand sanitizer and giving it out to first responders in the area.