On April 9th, Danish toy company LEGO announced that they had retrofitted dozens of their machines to make protective facial visors to donate to hospitals in Denmark and possibly around other EU countries.
“This week we began to make visors at our factory in Billund for healthcare workers on the frontline in Denmark. We are so incredibly proud of the team who made this happen. They worked around the clock to create designs and make molds that can produce more than 13,000 visors a day. We are grateful to have such talented, dedicated and caring colleagues,” said LEGO’s Instagram on Thursday, under pictures of the machines at work as well as several employees wearing their lightweight prototypes.
While visors aren’t the N95s that provide true protection, they’re an important part of PPE for many healthcare workers and first responders. Eyes can be a vulnerable inlet for infection, and a solid barrier make them much less vulnerable. LEGO, who has made the same high-quality plastic product for almost 90 years, is the world’s largest toy company by revenue with over USD$2 million a year in sales, and is #97 on Forbes’s list of the 100 Most Valuable Brands. They also announced, without details, that they would be donating 500,000 LEGO sets to children in need.
LEGO isn’t the only company stepping into action to help the medical industry during the COVID-19 crisis. James Dyson, inventor of Dyson vacuums, has been designing medical ventilators that can be easily made in bulk. In less than a week, he made and donated 5000 of his first design. Interior design company IKEA donated 50,000 high quality filter masks to a Swedish hospital after finding them in a warehouse, unused. A sports team donated use of their private jet to bring masks to New York and Boston, when they had exhausted all other channels to get them. And a tech company in China donated thousands of respirator masks to Italian hospitals while they were being hit hardest by the virus. Generosity, it can be hoped, will see us through this.
Source: Good News Network