Tzu Chi Medical Foundation

Tzu Chi USA volunteers in Northern California had begun mobilizing a response in March, setting up their NorCal PPE Project Team mid-month, to take charge of procuring PPE for distribution. The team’s goal is to respond to hospitals’ PPE supply needs promptly to effectively support frontline healthcare workers.

From social distancing measures, to school closures, stay-at-home orders, and scarcity of personal protective equipment (PPE), people all across the globe have keenly felt the drastic changes made to familiar routines amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

When Tzu Chi Medical Foundation CEO Dr. William Keh received a shipment of 240 N95 respirators from Tzu Chi Northeast, he placed a call to Ken Larsen. In little over an hour, Mr. Larsen had arrived at their office in Alhambra with a special mission: to find N95 respirators for his daughter Heather, an intensive care unit nurse at the Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys, CA.

On April 29, Nina and Michale Heumann drove from Northridge in LA to the city of Alhambra, CA. There, they would pick up personal protective equipment from the Tzu Chi Medical Foundation’s office on behalf of the Gallup Indian Medical Center (GIMC) in Gallup, New Mexico – home to native Anasazi archaeological sites from as far back as 300 AD.

As Tzu Chi USA continues to donate precious medical supplies to hospitals and government officials, the volunteers distributing them do so driven by genuine concern about the safety of healthcare workers and first responders on the frontlines of attending to those directly impacted by COVID-19.

On April 24, a team from Tzu Chi Medical Foundation made its way to the Methodist Hospital of Southern California, with a donation of PPE, including 10,000 surgical masks, 1,000 N95 respirators, 80 pairs of goggles, and ten sets of protective coveralls.

Recognizing the widespread shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) in hospitals nationwide, volunteers from Tzu Chi’s Northwest Region established a ‘PPE Response Team,’ taking immediate action on March 28th to donate medical supplies to selected Santa Clara County hospitals.

Getting a million medical masks from Taiwan to New York within two weeks is quite a miracle. But, as Horace Wang, a Tzu Chi volunteer who was responsible for the shipments’ transport and customs clearance reveals, the kindness of people encountered along the way helped make it possible and did even more.

When the pandemic was raging in mainland China, Tzu Chi volunteers in the United States purchased personal protective equipment (PPE) and sent it to China. Now the pandemic is hitting the States hard, and volunteers have jumped through unimaginably difficult hoops to purchase PPEs in China and send them to the United States.

On the afternoon of April 18, 2020, Tzu Chi USA’s Southern Region chapter held a second distribution of face masks at its office in Houston.
In total, Tzu Chi USA’s Southern Region chapter distributed 2,490 medical masks and 120 cloth masks on April 18.