Health care professionals, amateur seamstresses, an engineer, and stay-at-home moms in the Great Lakes Bay Region came together to supply hospitals and communities throughout the nation with face masks, a key piece of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Visit the Bay County Health Department to learn the latest about the situation here.
Here’s how the key players in 4M: Mid-Michigan Mask Makers found each other and started crearing thousands of face masks to help protect people from COVID-19.
It all began when Tami Davis, who lives in Saginaw, noticed her Facebook feed filling with posts about how to make face masks at home. She talked to a friend from Washtenaw County who explained how to make the masks.
The needle began to thread through Davis’ mind.
She called an area hospital to confirm they were accepting homemade masks. Since they were, Davis formed a group chat of 20 people interested in helping and planned to create a Facebook page dedicated to mask-making.
Before she could create the page, Davis received a message from Heather Boyd, a Saginaw woman she’d never met. Boyd had already made a Facebook page for this purpose. They began working together. Davis then reached out to her friend Lynn Klammer, who lives in Frankenmuth.
“I called Lynn; I’ve known her for years,” Davis says. “Lynn told me, ‘I can’t sew, I can’t leave the house because of my asthma, but I can get donations.’”
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The cloth masks help limit and contain the risk of spread for people outside hospitals. Inside the hospitals, staff continue to wear disposable masks that offer a higher level of protection.With the three-person administrative team in place, their Facebook page quickly drew in more than 150 volunteers.
“It’s evolved as Facebook groups do,” Davis says. “We changed some rules and adjusted. Whatever it is we’re doing, two old friends and a random stranger, it’s working.”
The group’s first priority is to serve the Great Lakes Bay Region.
“Sew for your people first,” is the philosophy, Davis says. “If your aunt works in Idaho and she needs 12 masks for her at-home health agency, take care of your aunt first. Everything else (volunteers sew), we ask that it be returned to the group so we can respond to donation requests quickly.”
Returning extra materials also is essential to the survival and evolution of the grassroots donation groups as fabric becomes increasingly scarce.
“There is no elastic to be had,” exclaims Davis. Boyd, though, found a solution for that. She’s engaged to an engineer, who used a 3-D printer to make bias tape. Bias tape helps replace the elastic so the mask holds its shape. “We improvised,” Boyd says. “You find a way to do it.”
Having distributed more than 3,000 masks, 4M: Mid-Michigan Mask Makers is reaching out to hospitals, healthcare workers, nursing homes, and contract workers. With requests piling up, the group fulfills the needs as they can, using innovative ways to distribute masks while bearing in mind social-distancing orders from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Davis maintains there is no contact while distributing the masks. Drop stations are sprinkled throughout the area — one in Auburn, one in Shields, two in Midland, one in Saginaw, and a pick-up in Frankenmuth if needed. Creators drop masks into containers. End users pick them up from different containers. There are no face-to-face interactions.
4M: Mid-Michigan Mask Makers has donated masks, materials, and fabric to individuals, hospitals, and police departments in the area. The ever-growing group has sent donations as far as Texas and Arizona.
Davis encourages people who need donations or want to volunteer or donate supplies to join their Facebook page. Volunteers and donors can message Davis through Facebook Messenger or send a text to (989) 996-5196.
Similar to 4M: Mid-Michigan Mask Makers, another Facebook group has formed entitled Crafters Combating COVID. The group is based in Grand Rapids but has members throughout the Great Lakes Bay Region.
On March 19, Lisa Hayes, a content strategy consultant and mother of three, was watching the news and saw that doctors and hospitals were calling for mask donations.
“What resources do we have that would make this easier on healthcare facilities and care-givers?” Hayes says she recalls thinking.
First, thoughm, Hayes needed to learn to sew. She contacted her friend Michee Vrtis, who has been sewing for more than 25 years. Communicating via Facebook, they arranged for Hayes to pick up Vrtis’ sewing machine and Vrtis would then teach Hayes through video tutorials.
A few other women jumped on the Facebook thread and were interested in helping. Hayes created the Facebook group Crafters Combating COVID that night and by the morning the group had 429 members.
“We invited a few friends and their friends invited friends and so on,” Hayes says. “Now we have 1,333 members.”
With momentum pushing her forward and a Facebook group quickly filling with eager volunteers and hopeful recipients, Hayes began reaching out to contacts she knew in the medical field.
“I started making phone calls,” Hayes says. “We have a lot of people in our family. We have a lot of contacts in the medical field.”
While group members were reaching out to hospitals, others were preparing their homes to become drop-off sites. Their porches turned into hubs where members drop off masks and those in need receive them. Hayes’ husband, Jack Lipton, expressed concern about aiding in the spread of COVID-19 if people from the area are dropping off and picking up masks from porches.
Lipton is the chair of Translational Neuroscience at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine. Lipton decided to use his laboratory’s resources to sanitize the masks that arrive on his porch.
Lipton has access to an autoclave in his lab. The autoclave uses high temperatures and steam pressure to ensure the masks are sanitized and ready to be distributed without the worry of spreading COVID-19.
As of April 7, the group has made 6,674 masks and was maintaining a steady stream of production. Locations of drop-off points and more information about PPE in the Great Lakes Bay Region can be found on their Facebook page or through the website https://thrivegreatlakesbay.org/
Grassroots organizations are growing in abundance to combat COVID-19 and their efforts are not going unnoticed.
Magen Samyn, McLaren Bay Region’s vice president of marketing and business development, said the hospital is accepting donations of homemade masks. The hospital offers them to employees to use outside work to keep themselves, their families, and the community safer.
“We need to keep everybody safe,” Samyn said. “We’re grateful for the donations.
Inside the hospital, employees wear disposable face masks that offer maximum protection when they are encountering people who have COVID-19 and they cannot offer care from 6 feet away.
Community members can drop off donations at the McLaren Bay Region marketing building at 503 Mulholland St. between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. weekdays. Visit McLaren’s website for an up-to-date list of what’s being accepted.
Kristin Knoll, the planning and communications manager at Covenant Healthcare in Saginaw, said local volunteers have donated masks.
“These simple masks do not replace enhanced levels of personal protective equipment required when providing care to isolation patients and working in high-risk situations,” Knoll said. “These masks do help limit and contain the number of respiratory droplets shared by the person wearing the mask, helping limit the potential spread.”
As the staff at Covenant continue the fight to quell the virus, donations remain valuable for them and their patients. For information on where to drop off donations and what supplies are needed, go to https://www.covenanthealthcare.com/ch/donation-requests
For a tutorial on making and wearing the masks, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.