The University of Toronto is scouring labs across its three campuses for masks, gloves and other badly-needed protective equipment to donate to health-care workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis.
The university has so far collected more than 2,000 surgical masks, hundreds of thousands of gloves and more than 3,100 N95 respirators – which filter at least 95 per cent of airborne particles – to give to its hospital partners in the Toronto Academic Health Science Network.
The supplies are being distributed according to an ethical framework developed by U of T’s Joint Centre for Bioethics, which prioritizes health-care providers who face the highest risk of exposure.
“There’s a lot of eagerness to help wherever possible,” said Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives. “If we have excess supplies anywhere in the city or in the province, we should really be working to get those to front-line workers so they are protected.
“They are literally putting their lives on the line; we have to do whatever we can to support them.”
At U of T, individual researchers and departments across the three campuses, in fields as varied as dentistry, chemistry and ecology and evolutionary biology, have made available boxes of much-needed protective equipment.
U of T Mississauga’s department of chemical and physical sciences has pitched in with 5,200 pairs of gloves while the department of biology has set aside surgical masks, N95 masks and more than 30,000 gloves from teaching and research labs.
U of T Scarborough, meanwhile, has collected tens of thousands of medical supplies including masks, gloves, gowns and paper towels.
“It’s just the beginning of the pandemic and our hospitals are having trouble keeping critical safety supplies in stock,” said Holly Yuen, U of T Scarborough’s environmental health and safety manager.
“It’s encouraging to see our community coming together during these extraordinary times to show that we care for and support our essential medical workers who are on the front line fighting against COVID-19.”
Some protective equipment is being kept in reserve by U of T for researchers who are undertaking critical work related to COVID-19 or other time-sensitive research. That includes everything from developing COVID-19 medicines and better testing methods to modelling disease transmission.
Some equipment is also being preserved for residence staff, cleaning staff, environmental health and safety workers, campus police and health and wellness employees so they can continue their work safely.
U of T’s donation is just one element of its larger effort to limit the toll of the deadly virus, which has infected more than 750,000 people around the world, according to Goel.
He noted the university has dramatically changed the way in which it works to help “flatten the curve” of the pandemic by cancelling in-person classes and moving to online or remote learning.
U of T also launched a fund last week to support research that’s likely to make a rapid and tangible contribution to the fight against the virus.