A group of tour guides in Guilin bought 2,200 surgical masks and 400 pieces of protective clothing from overseas and donated them to Nanxishan Hospital of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Though Fan Meiqun, a tour guide in Guilin of Guangxi province, has to stop her work because of the ongoing novel coronavirus, she has stayed busy raising money to help local hospitals fight the epidemic.

As soon as she learned that Nanxishan Hospital in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region was a designated hospital for novel coronavirus patients and had a shortage of critical medical materials such as masks and protective clothing, Fan set up a group to raise money on the WeChat. It soon attracted over one hundred members. "We soon found it was hard to buy materials at home, because production can't meet the massive demand," Fan said. "So we decided to buy them from overseas, mainly through guides leading foreign tours abroad."

After collecting materials from South Korea, Russia, Thailand, Japan, Dubai, Vietnam and Myanmar, Fan and her team managed to purchase 2,200 surgical masks, 4,800 medical masks and 400 pieces of protective clothing.

"Even though some public transport in the country was stopped temperately, our members tried to send these materials to Guilin from overseas, which was definitely challenging," Fan said.

The donation fervor also swept Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province. Zhou Hong, who has worked at a travel agency for seven years, started a group on WeChat and her 400 members so far have brought a million masks from abroad to hospitals at home.

In Northwest China's Gansu province, 149,000 masks were carried from Vietnam to Lanzhou, by air on Thursday, thanks to tour guides in Gansu.

Tour guide Lu Yongxian, one of the donors, organized 500 kind-hearted people to buy these masks from Vietnam, and the donation was soon delivered to several hospitals with the help of the local government.