VOA常速英语:医学生帮助提供个人防护装备来抗击疫情

Face masks, gloves, disinfectants and hand sanitizers half a dozen medical students are helping in the fight against the corona virus in their own way.A couple of my classmates and I started Med Supply Drive.Our clinical rotations were delayed and at the same time we were getting this very intense need from emergency rooms and hospitals for PPE personal protective gear,and so we started this initiative as six students at Georgetown and now it's grown over to to over 600 students in the country.All members are still medical students so while they can't physically help in the hospitals, they can round up and donate PPE equipment.I didn't think that I would be useful on the frontline but I could definitely supplement the frontline you know this way.Volunteers started with calling various places that they thought could still have some sort of PPE and disinfectants left. And since all university courses were being conducted online and students went back home for the time of the quarantine.

They managed to conduct their volunteering work in 42 American states. We started off mostly by reaching out to different companies like research labs, tattoo parlors, nail salons, dentist offices just like maybe construction companies anywhere that we think would have PPE like gloves or masks that they can donate. We like called them, email them and we got a lot of positive responses from places like that. Students themselves pick up the donations or have them brought to their doorstep. Many of them have dedicated some space in their apartments to serve as an impromptu warehouse. We have a taped off area in my house so that all the supplies will stay there so when people drop off supplies to my house, they leave it on the porch and then I come down with gloves and I wipe it off and then I put it in the clean area so that it stays contained in that one place. Then the supplies get packaged and taken to a number of hospitals. I spent time making contacts at the hospital so I would just cold call the front desk and say hi I have supplies, can someone take them in the hospital? And from there we started building this relationship where they would reach out to me and say hey needs that in need of this. And I would reach back out to the departments and to labs and say does anyone else have this and I just kind of blast out emails like that. On average in every major city about 10 hospitals work with Med Supply Drive, the organization has been working for less than a month but the students have already collected and donated thousands of boxes with medical supplies and PPE. We've had over 100,000 donations and over 10,000 masks I believe. Med Supply you have completely came to game for us, thank you so much, you are phenomenal humans,and thank you thank you thank you theres genuinely no way to say how pleased that we are.Despite the great start, volunteers say the supply of face masks and gloves is running low so they are hoping for alternative ways to help doctors and have already found volunteers who want to sew masks for the hospital staffs and 3d print hard face masks. For Lesia Bakalets in Washington and Anna Rice VOA news