As head stonemason at the National Cathedral in Washington, Joe Alonso knows the ins and outs of the church better than anyone.
With the number of coronavirus patients soaring, health care workers are facing an extreme shortage of masks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has even advised health care workers to reuse masks or use bandanas and scarves because something is better than nothing.
The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Party’s coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.
Knowing how desperately needed these masks were, officials at the cathedral immediately contacted both the manufacturer and the CDC to confirm that they were still safe to use. Then, they got to work figuring out a donation plan.
“In these difficult and trying times, the Cathedral community is doing everything we can to help protect the most vulnerable among us from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic,” the Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, dean of Washington National Cathedral, said in a statement.
On Wednesday, Hollerith and others helped load boxes of masks into a van to deliver them to local hospitals. The cathedral said 2,000 masks were delivered to Children’s National and 3,000 masks were delivered to Georgetown University Hospital. “The Cathedral will retain a small number of masks to facilitate in pastoral care needs,” it said in its news release.
The masks were purchased back in 2006, when the bird flu known as H5N1 had the world on edge. They were meant to allow the cathedral’s clergy to “provide pastoral care without putting their own health at risk,” according to the cathedral.
But after the flu had dissipated without causing much damage in the United States, the masks were put in storage and forgotten about.
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