This 13-year-old is making and donating free masks amid COVID-19 fears

A 13-year-old Falls Church native in Virginia, Charles Randolph, has joined the fight to combat the widespread of the deadly coronavirus pandemic in the United States. There are at least 65,201 cases of the novel coronavirus in the U.S. with 928 deaths so far.

As numbers of confirmed cases and suspected cases in the United States increase, Randolph got worried and decided he needed to contribute his quota to efforts aimed at stemming the spread.

Randolph’s passion to help humanity led him to start the production of masks using his parents’ 3D printer and donating them amid the COVID-19 fears, ABC7/WJLA reports.

“I saw in the news that high-risk patients, people with existing diseases like heart problems and asthma, I thought this would help him,” said Randolph.

Wondering how Randolph could suddenly begin the production of masks to help stem the spread of COVD-19, his parents signed him up for enrichment classes when he was younger, where he learned about 3D technology and the knowledge he acquired then has now proven handy.

“You use a slicer which takes the product that you got off Thingiverse and it turns it into code that the 3D printer can read. This is the first real, useful thing that I’ve made,” Randolph told ABC7/WJLA. “It may not be 100 percent of a filtration system but it works.”

The director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases has warned the coronavirus pandemic is “accelerating” in the United States and “there are other parts of the country which we need to get a better feel for what is going on.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci issued the warning on CNN Wednesday night, as more than 200 deaths from Covid-19 were reported that day in the United States.

“The way we do that is by increasing testing and identifying people who are infected, isolating them getting out of circulation, and then do contact tracing,” Fauci said. “New York City is dominating the situation in the United States. About 60% of the infections are in the New York City metropolitan area, and 56% of the new infections are coming from the New York City metropolitan area.”