The founder of the Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care is playing a lead role in bringing huge shipments of personal protective equipment to Canada.

Dr. Joseph Wong started StopCOVID19gta.com, which imported 200,000 masks during the Easter long weekend.

Most of them went to hospitals in Toronto, York and Peel regions; about 60,000 pieces reached social service agencies, nursing homes and seniors’ buildings.

“I’m ordering 300,000 more,” said Wong, whose latest project is distributing 15 million pieces of PPE from the Greater Toronto Area to long-term-care and retirement homes across the country.

It’s called CAPES — the Canadian Alliance to Protect and Equip Seniors Living — and it’s made a normally competitive industry come together.

Suggested by Melody Lo, a Yee Hong board member, CAPES asked “the big guys,” such as Chartwell and Revera Living, to add 35 per cent to their orders for “mom-and-pop shops” — companies which own single retirement homes, or just a few.

“I have never seen anything like that,” said Wong, explaining that right now those smaller owners can’t buy PPE on the open market.

As the pandemic began, China, then Europe and then the U.S. backlogged PPE orders by taking all they could grab. Since then, many people in Canada have changed their attitudes on wearing a mask in public.

Yee Hong decided its biggest fundraising event, the annual Dragon Ball, would continue on Jan. 25, but 90 minutes before the doors opened, Wong heard about Toronto’s first COVID-19 case.

He grabbed some hand sanitizer and brought 100 masks to the convention centre for the hospitality staff to wear.

By early March, hearing that the U.S. was conducting very few coronavirus tests, Wong knew it spelled trouble for Canada. “I already said we should be wearing masks out there.”

Since then, Wong thinks that our governments have done a decent job of sourcing PPE.

Ottawa and the embassy in Beijing managed to scoop up a few million N95 masks, he said, before the Trump administration snatched up orders from April 10 to the end of May.

“If you want to order N95 in China now, you’re out of luck,” Wong said.

Both sourcing organizations Wong helps run — between his house calls to elderly patients in Scarborough — are careful to avoid substandard goods.

Wong has “heard horror stories” about some PPE for sale. The City of Toronto delivered $200,000 worth of masks last month to its long-term-care homes, and had to recall them all after they were found to be defective.

Since April 1, the Chinese government has required a certificate of export and testing by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment for PPE going overseas. Canada’s embassy in Beijing also maintains a “gold list” of approved suppliers.

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“We look for companies which have a long history,” said Wong.

Not many Canadians can sew their own protective masks, and Wong would also like to see masks for sale in supermarkets and drugstores.

“Let us be realistic. Ordinary people also need protection,” he said. “Because of the community spread, you never know who you will run into.”