Alberta Health Services (AHS) has received hundreds of N95 respirators from Aurora Cannabis as the Alberta-based company looks at how it can best fight COVID-19.

Rick Savone, Aurora’s senior vice-president of global government relations, said the company has donated 200 of the much-needed face masks for AHS to use as they want. He believes they will be used to directly support frontline health-care workers.

“We’re part of the community in Edmonton and in communities across Canada and we’re as concerned as anybody about what is going on and feel we need to do our part,” said Savone.

Savone said the masks were donated after the company consulted with different governments and their own employees on ways that they could help the fight against the ongoing viral pandemic.

“There’s a lot of different equipment that we use throughout our facilities. We’ve got researchers and scientists and manufacturing,” said Savone. “I know that we heard from health officials that they were looking for those N95 masks so we mustered up what we could.”

Savone said Aurora Cannabis is now working to find other ways it can support governments and health authorities in fighting the virus. He expects Aurora will make further announcements about initiatives it’s undertaking in the coming days.

“I don’t want to call them donations because I feel like it’s just doing our part. So there’s going to be more of that,” said Savone.

AHS has previously stated they have an adequate supply of the N95 respirators but they were ensuring the masks are being used properly to ensure that supply does not run out.

One of the measures they’ve taken is not providing nurses with the respirators while they are swabbing patients to test for COVID-19. That decision led to a dozen Edmonton nurses refusing to perform the swab.