WORTH AN ‘A’ IN PPE

They’re years away from needing to don their own protective gear, but that’s not stopping young medical students around New York from rounding up thousands of donations of PPE for health care workers on the front lines of the city’s coronavirus epidemic.

Laura McLaughlin, a New York University med student, is working with aspiring physicians across the city to collect personal protective equipment for doctors and nurses in need through PPE2NYC.com.

“It was started a couple weeks ago by some NYU M.D.-Ph.D. students and they basically started collecting donations right from their labs,” said the 25-year-old Los Angeles native. Word spread quickly, and soon some students were collecting spare equipment from tattoo parlors, veterinarians and dentists among others.

“So we decided to make a hotline for doctors to ask for masks or gloves or gowns and we connected them to a donor in their neighborhood.”

The Kips Bay resident founded the hotline and then created the accompanying website. She and her friends weren’t even aware at first of just how serious the dwindling supply-chain problem had become.

“First we were reading about it on the news, but knowing friends who were doctors, we were seeing how bad it was getting and hearing firsthand from doctors on the hotline,” McLaughlin said.

“Our med school was put on hold for a while, and we had nothing to do but we had a lot of motivation to help.”

As word of the hotline spread among donors and doctors, it also began reaching medical students across