1. How is this effort different from the other PPE efforts I have seen?

In working with public and less-served institutions, equity is critical to our mission. Our health care providers need many types of PPE. We are producing and distributing face shields - an important part of the solution that can be cost effectively sourced by our partners. The visors can be reused, and the plastic shield is cost effective and easily replaceable. We are a team of professionals with deep domain expertise: private sector design-manufacturing partners COSMO and Newman Design; faculty from UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry and School of Public Health; a scientist from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory independently volunteering her time; and an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. We are working directly with the heads of infection control, system logistics, and firstline responders at Bay Area county hospitals (for example the Alameda Health System) and emergency response systems to ensure maximum usability of our designs. We actively incorporate the feedback of healthcare providers, which helps us ensure that hospitals can accept our donations.

2. What are we buying and where are we sourcing from? Having adapted UCSF’s standardized open source face shield design, we are buying parts and materials including: 3D printed visors, plastic shields, foam, and elastic bands. These components are readily available through standard commercial supply channels. We’ve made our own adjustments to ensure the final product fits the specifications of different healthcare providers.

3. What is the cost? Roughly every 2 dollars you donate will enable us to fabricate a face shield. That means that $20 makes 10 shields, and $50 dollars gives the healthcare providers in the Bay Area another 25 shields. We have a mix of contributors, with different cost recovery needs. We’ll keep you updated.

4. Who specifically are we donating to? We are working directly with the heads of infection control, system logistics, and firstline responders at Bay Area county hospitals (for example Alameda Health System) and emergency response systems to ensure maximum usability of our designs. We actively incorporate the feedback of healthcare providers, to ensure that our donations are put immediately to use. Equity is critical to our mission. We have partners whose need is confirmed and suppliers who can meet that need. We’ll be starting with donations to Highland Hospital in Oakland, then scaling our efforts from there.

5. What does the demonstrated need look like? Our recipients are currently using hundreds to thousands of shields each day for their healthcare professionals to stay safely protected. With your support we can make a tangible impact.