actually, thousands you say?
in an odd trun of events Uk pm has apparently tested positive
Hundreds of thousands. Thereās at least one for every soldier in the personal equipment, and thousands more in stock. There are also usually a few thousands on offer on eBay from military surplus items that went beyond their shelf life or were replaced with newer models. If you want a decorative item, you can find the most weird stuff there (Russian ones with the tube coming out the mouth are the spookiest). If you want to use them as a protective mask, take care to test them properly first (basically do a respirator fit test).
I propose you can make the initiative similar to the Get Us PPE site, a campaign to procure, hack and make protective equipment for hospitals. Itās U.S. based, but a similar thing would be useful globally ā¦
are you up for helping with this?
I will tell you all I know about the topic. No time for more hands-on help, sadly 
As a Get Us PPE style initiative this makes sense. For the general public it would not make sense as there are just not enough of these masks around for everyone.
To my knowledge, healthcare workers prefer the FFP2 / FFP2 āfiltering facepieceā single-use masks due to comfort in long shifts and because they donāt have to be disinfected. But if the situation gets much worse, they will need everything that can be made available. So yea, I think it makes sense.
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thatās already more than enough <3 we can take it from there.
USA now has the most active cases. National leadership would be a joke if it was SO not funny. I am doing ok so far, or so it seems.
there seems to be quite a lot of that going around.
This is a New York Times column about the influence of the evangelical right wing on the current administration, which explains at least in part, why they are so spectacularly incompetent in dealing with this crisis.
" For decades, Christian nationalist leaders have lined up with the anti-government, anti-tax agenda not just as a matter of politics but also as a matter of theology. Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council, one of the Christian rightās major activist groups, has gone so far as to cast food stamps and other forms of government assistance for essential services as contrary to the ābiblical model.ā Limited government, according to this line of thinking, is āgodly government.ā
When a strong centralized response is needed from the federal government, it doesnāt help to have an administration that has never believed in a federal government serving the public good. Ordinarily, the consequences of this kind of behavior donāt show up for some time. In the case of a pandemic, the consequences are too obvious to ignore."
Yesterday we tired out @HadeerGhareeb game ādidiasksā in a video call. Was good fun and social exercise :). But the call was disconnected a few times, so we thought about making the game into a discord thread.
This is the first start :). @HadeerGhareeb will ask us as a community her carefully designed questions for opening up socially.
The first one is about the future of communication. Have a look at the link and give your answer :).
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Just watched this beautiful video. A reminder that all shall pass.
DANCE DANCE from Thomas Blanchard on Vimeo.
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trying to play hangman in a language I do not master, with a 7 year old who cannot yet spell. 
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Sounds like fun. I tried once to play Bananagrams in Armenian, while speaking like at 5yo at best, and knowing a fraction of the alphabet. It was entertaining, especially for who got to check on my spelling and words.
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letās just see what happens if this is put here :):
I spent this (rainy here in northern California) weekend alternating between reading, talking and listening about the now-rapid spread of the virus in the USA in a general state of horror, semi-escaping by doing numerous video chats with family spread out around the country, one of which was a dance party with 3 generations, and completely escaping by reading a novel. When it wasnāt raining I was often out in my big yard gathering up fallen tree branches from over the winter so I can burn them while it is still permitted. Looks like fire season and the virus might overlap this year in California. Almost too much to contemplateā¦
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Giving this a go, after a while away - nice to see some familiar faces here again!
I turned 38 this weekend, and after looking at different video tools, I figured out a way to hack zoom into using it like time-limited video inbox for video greetings, as an experiment in using video, and the scope for expression it offers over text:
https://blog.chrisadams.me.uk/2020/03/29/experiments-with-remote-birthday-greetings/
It worked out pretty well - I had designed this specifically to make it possible for a group of people to send a message at the same as a recorded video, but what came through were mainly individual video greeting, which were still nonetheless welcome. It sucks that the only service I could use for this was zoom, even after paying to try out a bunch of competitors - lets hope we see a more diverse ecosystem evolve over the coming months.
Also, given weāre all talking COVID-19, I shipped a related project I started working on last week, with a long standing client, Spendnetwork.
It uses the last ten years of collated open spending data to make it easier to for budget holders to find suppliers of critical products and services in the context of COVID-19:
Iām hoping itāll be useful, as in local government, when people leave their post in an organisation, lots of knowledge about supplier relationships leaves too, which slows an effective response.
The goal weāre going for is to mitigate against this, by piecing together information from lots of organisations that arenāt in competition from each other, and whose aggregate activity can reveal patterns in their own expenditure, resulting in better use of limited funds.
with some of this out of the way, Iām expecting to get back to some community building work on http://climateAction.tech and the Green Web Foundation, but thatās for another update.
Stay safe, fellow ryders 
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Hei, @mrchrisadams, happy birthday!! Very cool! So your meeting was set to last for a whole day, so that it records everything during that day?
Was just reading this on fb, people doing bday parties and even wakes 
Last night I went to a birthday on Zoom. Gloria Gaynor - I will survive with lyrics on shared screen and danced on Phoenix - lark. I also had cake in tune with the times, meaning in the shape of toilet paper roll that was written āWiping away another yearā. (Happy Birthday Andreea Mottram!
I wish you a lot of time
How do you guys bring the offline connection to online? Maybe you have happy hours on Zoom or Skype as you had weekly after work. Maybe you can meet your friends to eat together in front of the camera if you canāt go to the restaurant once a month. Maybe break the big family Sunday meal in small active windows. Maybe you can throw parties where everyone dances in their own room to a common music. Maybe continue an online support group. Look, an extraordinary example I found the online wake of the late professor -------, where people who knew him and shared events and stories about him in a dedicated Facebook group.