Amazon's drone engineers have turned their skills to making protective face shields for health workers to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
The tech giant published a blog post on Thursday saying a technical program manager at the company got into making masks with a group of 3D-printing enthusiasts in March. The manager then approached Amazon's Prime Air drone team to get involved with the project. (Business Insider reported this from a leaked memo in early May.)
Once Amazon settled on a design it open-sourced it for 3D printers and then started manufacturing the shields itself. "To date, Amazon has donated nearly 10,000 face shields and is on track to deliver 20,000 more in the coming weeks," the company writes in its blog.
On top of the donations, Amazon's going to start selling the masks on its website to healthcare workers.
"To help quickly meet the growing requests from medical professionals across the country, we have decided to start mass-producing these face shields and aim to make hundreds of thousands available over the next few weeks, at-cost, on Amazon.com," the company writes.
It didn't give a price-point but said it would be able to sell them for a third of other face shields on the market.
Amazon isn't the only tech company to turn its hand to manufacturing PPE. Apple has been making face shields since April and said it hopes to ship 1 million per week. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' space exploration company Blue Origin has also been 3D printing shields.
