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“To this day I have no idea where that shipment went,” Kapur said. “It’s like somebody pulled up with a truck, picked up our pallets and put them on a different plane and it disappeared and nobody will know because it was just cash changing hands.

“It was like the Wild West at the airport.”

To Chin, it sounded like “modern-day pirates.”

The panicked buying from governments and institutions around the world not only highlights the frenzy to secure protective equipment as the pandemic spread, but also the determination and generosity that rose to meet it.

Photo by Supplied

Chin and Kapur never got those masks, but they did create a campaign that is raising funds for the COVID-19 fight.

Chin isn’t on the front lines of COVID-19 treatment, but she and her then-husband were during the SARS outbreak in 2003. As she watched the novel coronavirus pandemic spread, it rekindled her fear. She is now the medical director of Toronto’s Executive Health Centre and wanted to help.

At the same time, she had a patient with cancer whose aggressive treatments compromised her immune system. Chin wanted to give her surgical masks to protect her. Chin asked Kapur, who runs Xthetica, a wellness supply company, if he could get her patient a box of masks.

He made some calls and found they were already in short supply. He called a medical supply contact in Europe who told him they were ordering masks from China. He could do that too, he was told, but there was a minimum order.