Coronavirus: 'His Dark Materials' costume department makes scrubs for UK medics

The costumers behind adventure fantasy series "His Dark Materials" have come forward to make scrubs for healthcare workers fighting the coronavirus outbreak in the UK.

The initiative, "Helping Dress Medics", unites the staff in the HBO-BBC series costume department in Cardiff, Wales, and around the country to stitch garments and supply to the closeby National Health Service (NHS) hospitals.

"This should make things quicker, keep costs down and ideally keep any risk of contagion to a minimum.

"We are liaising with hospital staff directly in the areas we live and taking advice from them about what they need, so that we can specifically help them. The nature of how the virus is spread means that the demand for scrubs is especially high," Variety quoted the group saying in their fundraising statement. The group was formed by the show's costume supervisor Dulcie Scott and fundraising team members include series costume designer Caroline McCall, Primetime Emmy winner for "Downton Abbey", Fiona McCann, Ellie Munro, Jacqueline Sewry, Cathy Tate and Emma-Jane Weeks.

Launched Saturday, the initial target of the group was 1,500 pounds, but by Monday morning, they had collected 8,165 pounds. "I'm so delighted to report that this has gone way beyond any of our expectations  both in donations and also in offers of help. Many more costume makers have joined us and we have been able to order lots more fabric, make many more scrubs (and) reach other parts of the country.

"The first delivery of fabric is due today. The skills of these talented people, along with your amazing generosity, will mean that by the end of this week there will be NHS workers wearing wonderful new scrubs," Scott said. In the past, American medical dramas such as "Grey's Anatomy", "The Resident" and firefighter drama "Station 19" donated items from their sets to nearby hospitals struggling with shortage of supplies.

Last week, Costume Designers Guild gathered members to sew masks for hospitals to support the medical community during the COVID-19 pandemic. "His Dark Materials" actor James McAvoy too donated 275,000 pounds to a crowdfunding campaign set up by a group of doctors under the NHS to combat the deadly virus.

An official adaptation of Philip Pullman's novel, the series is set in an alternative world where all humans have animal companions called dmons, which are the manifestation of the human soul. More than 700,000 cases of the novel coronavirus have been officially declared around the world since the start of the pandemic, according to a tally on Monday based on official sources. 

There have been at least 715,204 cases including 33,568 fatalities in 183 countries and territories.