SpaceX employees are building face shields, making hand sanitizer, and scheduling a blood drive with the American Red Cross. The materials will be donated to medical facilities in America, helping to fight the coronavirus pandemic, while the blood drive will take place in Hawthorne. This support is much appreciated as many hospitals are running low on protective equipment for staff, ventilators for patients, and other supplies.
An internal memo directed at Elon Musk’s aerospace company space-suit-making employees instructed them to build 75 face shields over the weekend and deliver them to Cedar Sinai – a local health system near SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Mission accomplished! At the same time, they also donated 100 “Tyvek” protective suits to medical personnel there. Meanwhile, the workers are scaling up efforts to produce and distribute the home-made hand sanitizer that is effective at killing the COVID-19 coronavirus and complies with CDC guidelines.
The memo also outlined some ways in which the company will be helping everyone working during the pandemic. It has arranged for all food outlets at SpaceX sites to cut food prices in half, and it is letting employees scan their badges to clock their hours instead of using the usual fingerprint scanner.
All of this relief and support for health care workers has come shortly following Musk’s change of attitude about the pandemic. Initially, he felt that the “harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself,” and that the panic surrounding COVID-19 was dumb. He had repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the disease, and even told employees in an email that “they were more likely to die in a car crash than from the virus.” Yet, now two SpaceX workers have already tested positive for COVID-19 with another dozen having to be sent home to quarantine.
Musk has been all in offering to use his companies to fight the pandemic. Tesla purchased 1250 ventilators from China and donated them to California hospitals. Also, it sent tens of thousands of N95 surgical masks to the University of Washington’s Medical Center. Meanwhile, the company’s Gigafactory in New York awaits the green light to start manufacturing ventilators to help the states strained health care system. Many American cities are in desperate need of medical supplies as the coronavirus pandemic worsens across the country.
