Makers unite: Speeding PPE to a COVID hospital

Dan: Hey there, how you holding up? Welcome to season 19. I sincerely hope this will not be our longest season, but our story this time is about hope. It’s about making do in a time of crisis.

It’s about people coming together in. Extremely weird circumstances who never met each other before to get things done quickly. And it’s a story from New York City, which we think is a couple weeks or so ahead of where the rest of us are heading. So I hope it’s gonna give a lot of us some ideas about what we can do and how we can be helpful.

This is an arm and a leg, a show about the cost of healthcare. I’m Dan Wasted. I’ve been saying for a while that the show is focusing on self-defense because a cavalry isn’t coming, and that one job for this show is to help us train ourselves up to be some version of that cavalry to hold the line. And right now, holding the line is literally a life or death situation on a scale we haven’t really seen before.

People quote Mr. Rogers a lot these days about what to do in a crisis. Find the helpers. And this is a story about people deciding to become the helpers and finding each other. It’s wild and it’s really, really lovely. Alright, let’s go. This story starts right in the middle of March when New York City basically shut itself down and a lot of people’s jobs just totally went away.

That includes people like Cat Navarro.

Cat Navvaro: Okay. Who I was before all of this maybe. Okay. Yeah. My name’s Cat. Cat Navarro, c Cat with a C. I work as an art director.

Dan: It turns out an art director is the person who’s in charge of getting whatever needs to be in front of a camera to wherever that camera’s gonna be pointed on time and on budget.

So if somebody’s like, we’re shooting a commercial tomorrow and we need a polar bear in a 15 foot red plastic submarine. The art director is the person in charge of finding a polar bear and finding somebody to make that submarine and getting everything wherever it needs to be. So being an art director means having a network of people.

You may not know where to get a polar bear, but you are not the first art director who’s ever been asked for one. So in New York, art directors and the army of people they work with folks who know how to find things, folks who know how to make things collectively. They’re the art department. They stay in touch and in the middle of March.

Those folks were congregating in a Google group,

Cat Navvaro: and originally people had just been posting in this Google group because everybody had lost their jobs at the same time.

Dan: So they had time like to compare notes on severance.

Cat Navvaro: This production is paying two weeks of pay for this or this production is whatever

Dan: Cat was in there.

She saw when someone posted about their sister who was a doctor and needed supplies like N95 masks, and she saw on the news. Where Vice President Mike Pence was asking construction companies to donate N95 respirator masks to hospitals, and she thought maybe we could help with that.

Cat Navvaro: We work with scenic paints, we work with carpenters.

You work with people who use N95 masks all the time,

Dan: and so she wrote to the Google group,

Cat Navvaro: does anybody have access to their production shops? Like, can we get in here and is there a way that we can. Get all these N95 masks and any other supplies, and then it kind of just sort of snowballed from there.

And I think a lot of people were going into their old jobs getting not just masks, but any gloves that they found.

Dan: And then there was a question, what to do with all this stuff? One guy in the group has a friend who works for New York City Health and Hospitals, which runs public hospitals and clinics all over town.

Her name is Christina . This guy from the group was texting Christina about COVID stuff. Anyway, he had questions. She knew stuff, and then he texted Christina about what all his art department pals were up to.

Christina : And he said, Hey, I have a group of friends here who are ready to donate masks and drop them off at the mayor’s office.

And I said, that’s great, don’t do that.

Dan: because nobody will know where they came from or what to do with them, and they’ll probably get thrown out. And he was like, you know what, I’m gonna put you in touch with somebody. And that’s somebody. Cat

Christina : and Cat just sort of came out as a natural leader, and she’s extraordinarily organized, easy to work with.

Dan: Christina and Cat started getting a plan together to distribute everything. Cat’s Art Department community was collecting, and then Christina came across a set of specs from making face shields. They came from a hospital in Washington state, so they’d been vetted for safety by people who knew their stuff.

Christina : Um, I forwarded them to Cat and I said, Hey. Can you make these?

Cat Navvaro: It’s a super easy design and it’s a super easy thing that most people can make, let alone people who are skilled in making stuff like this. So I said, oh yeah, definitely. I can find people who can do this.

Dan: That would mean calling in the master Art department networker.

Eva Radkey, she runs an online community for art directors and everybody they work with. It’s called Art Cube Nation.

Eva: It is a network of freelancers around the world, can hire each other. Help each other out in a jam.

Dan: More than a thousand of these folks pay to belong to Eva’s network. So Eva sent out a call for an art cube army.

Eva: I was like, okay, we are going to need more. Than just makers. We might need space, we might need cars, we might need people who can teach us skills.

Dan: She says, about 120 people signed up right away. She sent about a dozen makers to cat and other folks figured out where to get materials like the specific vinyl sheeting from these specs and others got ’em delivered and all of them were following the safety specs from that hospital in Washington.

Eva: We observed all the protocols. We had gloves and masks. And we, the things were wiped down with alcohol, just as we were told to do as professionals in the film industry. We understand the importance of keeping everything as sterile and as clean as possible,

Dan: and they’re quick. Christina remembers Cat calling her about a day after getting the specs and saying, okay, I got like a hundred, 150 of these things.

Christina : I was just shocked that in 24 hours that that was already done. And I said, okay, I’m going to go find someone in health and hospitals who is willing to take this. And so I found, I found an ER physician who is part of our leadership, and he said, okay, give me everything.

Dan: Proof of concept established. They could get things made and do it fast, and hospitals would accept them gladly.

Next, they’re gonna wanna scale up a bit. Just to look back for a second on how we got here. Here’s this chain of people making suggestions and people saying yes quickly. Cat makes a suggestion to this Google group Roundup N95 masks. Somebody in that group happens to connect with Christina, who it turns out can help get the stuff where it actually needs to go.

Then Christina brings Cat the specs for making face shields and Cat ropes in Eva at Art Cube Nation who ropes in more people. And here they’re,

they come up with a new plan. Cat and her makers are gonna crank out 1500 face shields over the next three weeks. Eva has all the other logistics covered, and Eva’s ready to go bigger, get more strategic. She’s got more volunteers, more makers, small shops, big shops. There’s a logistics company. There’s a fabrication shop that splits.

Its time between making stuff for film and TV shoots. And making stuff for aerospace companies. And she even puts together her own system to take orders from hospitals. Meanwhile, Christina takes on the job of fundraising for materials and other costs.

Christina : I have volunteered in the past and have done some fundraising in the past,

Dan: so she was like, yeah, I can run a GoFundMe page and then here’s how I got wind of any of this.

And it’s where this chain of people helping each other become the helpers. It gets a little longer. The day after that GoFundMe went live, my friend Sally hers got an email. You might remember Sally. She’s a radio and podcast reporter, and she guest hosted a bonus episode of this podcast after our last season.

The email Sally got wasn’t a tip. It was a plea for help that went to a whole community of radio and podcast folks, and it came from a reporter, a friend of Sally’s whose brother is an ICU doc at a hospital in Brooklyn, and the staff at that hospital. Needed safety supplies. The email said those folks needed see-through plastic tarps, so medical staff could see patient monitors without actually entering an infectious area.

They needed IV tube extenders so staff could pump drugs into a patient from outside the room. The email said all the doctors and nurses are incredibly exhausted. My brother has had a cough for more than a week now, and when he called me last night. He was coughing through every other word. They need help quickly.

Sally remembers how she felt when she read that part

Sally: like everyone else, right? Like, you feel kind of helpless and you wanna do something. And I was like, oh, oh no, that sounds really bad.

Dan: And then Sally realized, wait, maybe she actually could do something. That’s right. After this,

this season of an arm and a leg is a co-production with Kaiser Health News. Kaiser Health News is an independent newsroom reporting on healthcare in America, and it’s not affiliated with the giant healthcare provider, Kaiser Permanente.

Those two share a common ancestor. It’s an interesting story. There’s a little more detail at the end of the show,

1. Sally got this email. Doctors need help. They need stuff and as it happens, Sally’s sister Jane is a set decorator and she is part of this art cube army.

Sally: I sort of knew vaguely that Jane had been, she’d been posting on Facebook about people making masks and I had like shared her post and liked it,

Dan: and now Sally’s like, oh, my sister’s involved in an effort to do this exact thing my friend’s brother needs.

Things move quickly. After about 30 minutes, Sally and her friend are on an email chain with Eva who wants to know exactly what they need.

Sally: Eva wrote back with questions like grommet or not grommet. How long is this plastic sheeting like opaque or transparent? Like, do you have pictures? Do you have links?

Like, what are you looking for? Right? And I was just like, wow. She’s like a. Stuffed superhero. Yeah,

Dan: a stuffed superhero. Oh, stuffed, not stuffed. Oh, stuffed stuff. Stuff. A superhero of stuff like, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sally: Like she, she knows to ask if something should be grommet or not. Right. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about grommets.

Dan: And an hour after that, Sally starts tweeting out links to the GoFundMe that Christina is running, and she keeps tweeting about it through the afternoon into the evening. The next day, Sally tweets and tweets until her friend says, Hey, uh, hold up. How do we know the money we’re raising through this?

GoFundMe is actually going to make the supplies my brother and his colleagues need at their hospital, and Sally’s like,

Sally: Oh. What a good question.

Dan: Right?

Sally: But I just started fundraising without, I was just like, big picture blue sky. Your brother needs stuff. We’re gonna get it for him. Donate to this fundraiser.

Cool. Awesome. Yay. But I didn’t, I’m like, I’m a Dan. I’m a big picture person. I’m not gonna worry about the details.

Dan: until she did. Sally wrote to her sister who got her in touch with Cat right away.

Sally: She was so nice. The minute I talked to her on the phone, I felt so much better. ’cause I heard her voice and I was like, oh, everything’s gonna be fine.

We worked out a deal and I was kind of aggressive. I was like, I feel like I’ve raised $2,000 and I’ve like sent out 5 billion tweets and posts and like I even posted on LinkedIn and like I see the names of the people that are donating money and they’re from like the public radio community. Mm-hmm. And she was like, okay, cool.

Dan: Sally wanted assurance that some of the money would go where she wanted it sent, and she got it. The deal amounted to this. Once the GoFundMe met its initial goal, the money required to get that batch of 1500 face shields made. The rest would go toward the supplies for that hospital in Brooklyn. And one reason the deal worked was Cat felt like she had to put a limit on her team’s commitment.

Cat Navvaro: We do have worries again about. Just risking people’s exposure to stuff when we still have to do pass back and forth. A lot of materials between each other.

Dan: and every trip, every transfer means some risk. As careful as everybody is, you just can’t know for sure is the person you’re handing off to or getting something from a potential infection.

And meanwhile, Christina was stepping away from the GoFundMe page. It had met its initial goal, so she was transferring it to Sally and her friend, and they had never met.

Sally: I’ve never emailed with her or called her or texted her. I wouldn’t know her if we were socially distanced, walking our dogs right across from each other in the park.

Dan: Eva, who’s now coordinating everything, had never met Christina either. I talked with all these people on Tuesday, March 31st. That morning, Sally and her friend actually talked with Eva for the first time via Zoom. Everything until that point had been emails and text messages. Now with Cat and Christina bowing out, they would be coordinating things going forward.

Sally: I think what happened is kind of like this chain of trust, like yeah, I know my sister, I trust my sister, and I trusted that my sister, the group that she was working with, the fundraising group that was making the things was legitimate. Yeah. And trustworthy. So I trusted her and by an extension of that, I trust this woman, Eva, and I hope.

That it works out. Wow. Yeah, because we’re starting the first deliveries of things are supposed to reach the hospital tomorrow.

Dan: Wow.

In that chain, everybody is finding ways to use their personal and professional superpowers. For instance, Sally had been using her skills to extend that chain of trust to the hospital insiders to make sure they were ready to take delivery.

Sally: We had to like write to this guy at the hospital who wasn’t answering his email, and this is where a reporter skill kicked in.

’cause everyone was like, he’s not answering his email and. I’m gonna call him on the phone. Like, that’s what, so I called him up and he’s totally happy to talk on the phone. Turns out he’s a phone guy. You know, like, like that’s the kind of thing, that’s the kind of reporter skill, right? Like you’re like a bulldog.

You just go and go and go.

Dan: Eva sees it the same way she’s putting her training and experience to work.

Eva: The film industry has prepared me for this sort of work. You know, we work under extreme pressure and panic with no room for error. All the time, and so we’re equipped for this to react.

Dan: You must feel so proud.

Eva: You know, I don’t know how I feel yet. Like I don’t wanna count any chickens before they hatch. I just wanna see results. Yeah. I don’t have any feeling, I don’t wanna have any feelings except for get it done, girl. That’s how I’m feeling. Yeah. So thank you for telling me to be proud, but you know, I just, I just, you know, it’s nice to hear, but like, just let’s see the results and then if, you know, let’s have a big party when it’s all over.

Yeah, right. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get a doctor boyfriend out of it. Who knows? But anyway,

Dan: Cat says her team got their first 600 face shields delivered to the three hospitals that were waiting for them. Eva and Sally and Sally’s friend say they will keep at it as long as they can, as long as they’re needed till the actual cavalry arrives.

Cat’s team has done their bit, but there’s other makers, other companies lined up to help. And meanwhile, there’s this new chain of people working together. So New York is a couple weeks ahead of the rest of the country as far as anybody knows. I ask Sally what she thinks the rest of us can learn.

Sally: Find your makers, find your fundraisers.

Figure out what people’s abilities are. Get your chains ready, like get your chains ready, like figure out what you need to have in place.

Dan: All right, let’s definitely do that. And actually one other thing, don’t be afraid that what you have to offer isn’t enough. Just take the next step. Let yourself be the next link in the chain.

You may be better at it than you think. Take it from Sally.

Sally: I learned about some skills that I have, which is nice. I’m, I can be pretty hard on myself, and now I, I think like, wow, I guess I’m a good big picture thinker sometimes.

Dan: You can go to armanda leg show.com right now, or to our Twitter or Facebook and see a picture of Sally and her friend and Eva Radkey on their first Zoom call.

They look so happy, so pleased to be connected and taking the next step together. And you can become that next little piece of the chain. Right now, for one thing, we’ll have a link to that GoFundMe that those folks are running. You can click there and donate any amount. Bam. You’ve joined that chain. And I know there’s efforts like this going on all over and other ways people are stepping up, making new chains, holding the line.

Tell me about the ones you know about that you’re involved with, and they don’t have to be big. They can be something you did to help a neighbor stay home, stay safe, or something a neighbor did for you. I will definitely do my bit to spread the word. I think that’s gonna be a big part of what season 19 of this show.

Is all about. We need these stories. We need these examples. We need each other. Hit me up at arm and a leg show.com/contact or tag us on Twitter at arm and a leg show or call. Leave a message at 7 2 4 2 7 6 6 5 3 4. That’s 7 2 4 arm n leg. Until next time, end more than ever. Take care of yourself.

This season of an arm and a leg is more than ever made possible by you. We set a goal last season of getting 500 people to support this show on Patreon. As of today, we’re at almost 550 and that is why I’ve been able to bring this show back ahead of schedule. I’ve got a lot of new Patreons to thank When we get to the end of the credits and some signed up just in the last week, I can’t tell you how much this means.

First, this episode was produced by me, Dan Weisman. Our editors this time out are Whitney Henry Lester and Tonya English Dais. Rosario is our consulting managing producer, and Adam Raimundo is our audio wizard. Our music is by Dave Weiner and Blue dot sessions this season of an Armin and leg. It’s a co-production with Kaiser Health News.

That’s a nonprofit news service about healthcare in America. That’s an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News and Kaiser Family Foundation are not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente, the big healthcare provider, an insurer. They share an ancestor, that’s it.

This guy, Henry j Kaiser, he had his hands in a lot of different stuff. Including this. He built the US cargo fleet for World War ii. This one time, one of his yards, put a ship together in four days. At this moment, as we look at how the government can mobilize with the private sector to get big things done, it’s a story I’ve been thinking about a lot.

You can learn more about Henry Kaiser and Kaiser Health News at Arm and a Leg show.com/kaiser. Diane Weber is National Editor for broadcast, and Tonya English is Senior Editor for Broadcast Innovation at Kaiser Health News. They are editorial liaisons to this show. They’re great. Finally, thank you to some of our new backers on Patreon pledge.

Two bucks a month or more. You get a shout out right here. These are about half of the 90 people who came aboard since last time we did this. And we’ll do the rest next time. I could not be more grateful and I apologize to anybody whose name I mispronounce. I wasn’t planning to come back so early with new episodes, so I didn’t make time to fact check.

If I screw up, let me know. We’ll have do-overs. Okay, thanks. This week too, Barbara and Alan eo, Kessel Ho Danielle, Tracy Faley, Donovan Miller, John C Ro. Faith, Paul Wilke, Michael King. Alan Barrington, Mike Wheel Rich Cynthia, Ava C. Linda Seymour, Jay Hener, Sally De Palmer. Jess Bower. Maria Keller. Carolina Gonzalez.

Christine Reardon. Matt V. S Lee, Patrick Garmo. Alicia Hartley. Erica Engel. D Gco, Lorenzo Griego. Terry Plunkett Can Nine Play? Danny desotos, Kerns Aney, Cheryl Hall, David Dostal. Jennifer Merrill. Kazuki tei. Emery Pollina. Emily Woodruff. Laura Walch. Sarah Ing Zoya Kaufman. Felipe Ledesma Nunez, Alexis Young, Mark Johnson, Jonathan Sw, H Wick, and Hoefer and Luke Joman.

Thank you so much. Catch you again soon with more of Season 19. Stay home if you can. Stay as safe as you can. Let’s get through this together.