LEGO Factory is Now Producing Thousands of Protective Plastic Face Masks for Medical Workers
The LEGO Group is offering their assistance to healthcare workers on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis by using their facilities to produce thousands of protective facial visors.
According to an Instagram post that was published by LEGO earlier this week, the company’s Billund-based factory in Denmark has reworked some of their machinery to make more than 13,000 plastic masks per day. The masks will reportedly be distributed to hospitals and medical facilities across the country.
Although these visors do not offer the same kind of protection as N95 masks, individuals and businesses around the world have been producing the plastic shields—as well as homemade cloth masks—for medical workers to use as additional protection in high-risk areas.
“This week we began to make visors at our factory in Billund for healthcare workers on the frontline in Denmark,” wrote the company. “We are so incredibly proud of the team who made this happen. They worked around the clock to create designs and make moulds that can produce more than 13,000 visors a day. We are grateful to have such talented, dedicated and caring colleagues.”
LEGO also announced this week that they would be donating 500,000 brick sets to children in need during the novel coronavirus outbreaks. The company did not specify how the sets would be distributed, but they did ask their social media fans to show additional support to the NHS by building a LEGO brick rainbow in solidarity.
This is not the first time that corporations have stepped forward to help during the COVID-19 crisis. Famed engineer and inventor James Dyson designed a ventilator for the UK government in just 10 days—and then he volunteered to donate 5,000 of the devices. IKEA staffers also donated 50,000 N95 masks to a Swedish hospital after they discovered the coveted masks collecting dust in a warehouse. A Chinese tech company sent tens of thousands of respirator masks to Italian hospitals hard-hit by the virus. The New England Patriots even made headlines last week after they used their private team jet to transport 1.2 million N95 masks from China to New York and Boston hospitals in need.
