Sourcing face masks for healthcare personnel from cleanrooms and other laboratories
Yesterday I read an article Apple donating face masks for healthcare personnel by Verge. The article mentioned other technology companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, and Ford helping to provide masks and other equipment to help fight Covid-19. Providing masks is not a core competence of any of these companies. I started to think how and why they are doing these things now. All of those companies, including a lot of other electronics and optics companies have cleanrooms where they use cleanroom face masks, which actually exceed the requirements of surgical masks. That claim is from cleanroom mask manufacturer’s web site, but I also found that Intel donated already in March 1 million face masks for healthcare personnel from their own factory stock and emergency supplies. That suggests that the cleanroom masks are considered useful. Like surgical masks, the cleanroom masks may protect others better than the mask wearer, but they still would be useful in taking care of the elderly.
In Finland we do not have large scale processor manufacturing but we do have electronics, space, and optics companies, universities (e.g. Aalto, ex-Tampere University of Technology) and research organisations (e.g. VTT), which may have their own or shared cleanrooms. Some of these cleanrooms are now idle, but they may still have an up-to-date storage of cleanroom masks and protective gear. In the current situation they could be donated and redistributed to healthcare personnel.
This may be something the healthcare or sourcing professionals have already considered, but I wanted to share the idea in case these sources of protective gear were for some reason overlooked. I am pretty sure this idea has occurred also to other people, but the point here is that, has it been evaluated, shared and communicated to all necessary people. If the idea has been thought feasible, it can be developed further by sharing it.
A public call-out for face maks and a clearly communciated contact address might be the quickest way to get those organisations with idle laboratories and spare face masks to contact healthcare. Other ways to find sources could be Business Finland and regulatory records. Any laboratories or places where masks are used and stored properly could be valid sources for face masks around the country — a school chemistry lab might work, or a paper factory with a chemical laboratory.
There may be some obstacles for using these kind of sources. One is that are there enough sources in Finland and masks in them worth the effort of acquiring them. There are cleanrooms of different levels in major universities around Finland, but the protection level and protective gear used in them may vary. Expanding this cooperation to the other sources might help here. The second obstacle is how to ensure that the gear is safe to use i.e. it is not infected, stored properly etc. There are probably also other considerations, which someone healthcare professional is able to analyse more competently.
If the idea is deemed feasible I think this would be a good cooperation opportunity between private and public sector to fight Covid-19 together.
