Ryan Petersen

Yeah, I mean, well, it was it was in the newspaper, but we have a group called Flexport.org.

We do shipping for humanitarian causes like refugee camps and hospitals, nonprofits at cost, sometimes below cost.

We had been part we're partnering with a lot of great groups like international aid groups and things like this.

And COVID, it was in the newspaper.

It hit in Wuhan.

And we actually got a ton of demand to ship masks to China for the doctors in China.

And so in January of that year, we shipped about 300,000 N95s from the U.S.

to China, which then like two months later when there were no N95s mass in the U.S., we're like, whoops.

So yeah, we saw that pretty early.

And then the other thing that came out in that period was people, about 50% of the world's air freight travel.

We do air freight too, not social freight.

And about 50% of the world's air freight flies in the belly of passenger planes.

And those all got grounded because of COVID.

There was no reason to, you know, I think they're actually grounded legally.

And so we saw, we were at the heart of kind of bringing masks, bringing PPE generally in for U.S.

hospital networks from mostly produced in China.

And so we saw this insane demand for air freight and there were no ships, no planes to move it.

And the ships are too slow.

Like hospitals are running out of masks.

So we saw that and got pretty active.