Inspire Me: Nurse spurs community to donate 16,000 masks to Oakland hospital

As the coronavirus began to spread in the U.S., Minfen Ding knew what to expect.

Since January, the oncology nurse at Sutter Health’s Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland had been in communication with friends and colleagues on the front lines of the pandemic response in her native China. Health care workers in the country, she learned, were contracting the virus at alarming rates, because they lacked proper personal protection equipment (PPE).