With Covid-19 infections across Europe reaching tens of thousands, Chinese tech companies are now donating face masks to other countries.
The latest company to join the effort is smartphone maker Oppo, which sent 300,000 masks to Italy, Spain, Germany, France and Japan. A third will be sent to Milan, the Italian city that’s been hit hard by the deadly disease. Oppo competitor Xiaomi also donated FFP3 masks (a rating similar to N95) to the Italian Civil Protection Department. Italy now has more than 24,000 Covid-19 cases.
Last Friday, Chinese billionaire and Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma announced he will donate 2 million masks to be distributed across Europe, with the first shipments arriving in Belgium. The billionaire also joined Twitter and used his first tweet to announce donations to the US, which will receive a shipment of 500,000 testing kits and 1 million masks.
Chinese tech firms were quick to react when the coronavirus outbreak was spreading rapidly through China. Donations of medical equipment and funds soared in January, with many companies providing logistics services, software, robots and even drone services and AI gene sequencing.
(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.)