Volunteers make thousands of masks for Orange County COVID-19 hot spot

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Week after week, the Semoran corridor in the 32822 ZIP code in Orange County has been a hot spot for confirmed COVID-19 cases.

Now, dozens of volunteers are working to make masks and flatten the curve.

Inside Liliana Umpierre’s craft room, she’s making tons of masks.

“We started doing all these masks for the hospitals and long-term care facilities,” Umpierre said. “After all that we decided, ‘Why don’t we try to get into the community directly?’”

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That’s when Umpierre started using the power of social media to get her message out, and it worked.

Umpierre got in touch with Rebecca Fernandez, who is helping to coordinate in a hot spot in the Semoran corridor. In a post, Fernandez said she was in need of 3,000 masks.

Fernandez is from the hot-spot area and said she started trying to help when she noticed people in the community were not wearing masks.

“You can walk into any grocery store along the Semoran corridor, whether it’s Golden Rod or Semoran, folks just weren’t wearing them,” she said.

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That was a few weeks ago. Now, she and Umpierre are part of a big group all working on different tasks, including 60 people sewing.

Right now, the volunteers have crafted about 2,000 masks to be handed out next Saturday, though the locations haven’t been decided.

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