VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - For students and teachers throughout the Commonwealth, masks will be one of the important back-to-school supplies due to Gov. Ralph Northam’s recent indoor mask mandate for all public and private schools.
One Virginia Beach business is offering adults and kids the resources to mask up.
“With the Delta variant right now, our production has gone back up. We’re getting huge, huge demand in masks, especially children masks,” CEO Vitali Servutas told News 3. “The last three weeks, we’ve seen orders shoot up where we’re trying to make 300,000-400,000 a day.”
Since May 2020, Premium-PPE has made a quarter of a billion masks in Virginia Beach.
“I think we’ve made a huge impact,” Servutas said. “We’re definitely going to step up to this challenge, again, to keep Americans safe.”
Servutas said Premium-PPE’s children’s mask is designed for children ages 6-12.
“The mask itself is a little bit smaller in size,” he said. “Our masks are easier to breathe through, even though you have a high-quality filtration. That’s something very important for kids.”
Masking is important for Tonya Rivers’s family in Virginia Beach. She said she’s been stocking up their supply ahead of the first day of the new school year.
“My students are too young to be vaccinated,” Rivers said. “Because they’re going to be closer, masking is going to be critical to make sure you try to slow the spread of the virus, especially in a school setting.”
“We’re definitely stepping up, converting some of the machines to the children [masks],” Servutas said. “We’re probably going to try to be the largest children mask manufacturer in the USA here shortly.”
For Rivers, sales signal a good sign.
“If the demand is there, that means that people are taking it seriously,” she said.