|

Staff members at the Pinghu branch of China Post are busy packaging collected medical masks before sending them to overseas Chinese around the world. [Photo/cnjxol.com]

Pinghu, a county-level city in Jiaxing, East China's Zhejiang province, recently collected 450,000 masks to support overseas Chinese, local media reported on March 16.

As the coronavirus epidemic spreads to other countries and regions outside the Chinese mainland, Pinghu Federation of Overseas Chinese launched a campaign to collect medical masks to support overseas Chinese, overseas Chinese students and Hong Kong and Macao residents who were born in Pinghu.

In response to the campaign, the epidemic directorate in Pinghu dispatched 30,000 medical masks, a local resident Shu Yuefei donated 10,000 masks, and the Jiaxing Federation of Overseas Chinese donated 5,000 masks.

Pinghu Federation of Overseas Chinese also established an online chat group on March 13 with nearly 380 Pinghu households living outside the Chinese mainland.

In addition to the mask donations, the federation also introduced policies related to epidemic prevention and control in China and the do's and don'ts during the epidemic to these overseas Chinese to help them get through the epidemic safely.

According to the latest report by the World Health Organization, by March 16, 86,434 confirmed cases (including 13,874 new cases) and 3,388 deaths (848 new deaths) had been reported outside the Chinese mainland.

WHO also announced that the total of confirmed cases outside the Chinese mainland outnumbers those on the Chinese mainland and on March 13, it declared Europe the epicenter of the epidemic.