Jack Ma has officially joined Twitter.
The Alibaba Group co-founder, who opened an account on the microblogging site within the last 24 hours, used his first tweet to show what he’s doing to help the United States amid the rapid spread of COVID-19.
“The first shipment of masks and coronavirus test kits to the U.S. is taking off from Shanghai,” he wrote in his post, which included two images of a China Eastern Airlines plane next to boxes that appeared ready for shipping. “All the best to our friends in America.”
In the U.S., confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus have climbed to almost 3,500, with at least 65 deaths recorded.
Ma’s donation comes three days after he announced that Alibaba’s philanthropic arm and his own namesake foundation have joined forces to provide 500,000 testing kits and one million face masks to the U.S.
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In a statement shared Friday on social media, the Jack Ma Foundation said that it had collaborated with the Alibaba Foundation over the past few weeks to “source and donate much-needed materials” to countries hit hard by the spread of the outbreak, among them Japan, Korea, Italy, Iran and Spain.
“Drawing from my own country’s experience, speedy and accurate testing and adequate personal protective equipment for medical professionals are most effective in preventing the spread of the virus,” Ma wrote in the memo. “We hope that our donation can help Americans fight against the pandemic.”
Last week, the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19, which originated in China in December, a pandemic. The agency noted that it had not chosen to use the term “lightly or carelessly,” describing a “pandemic” as the “worldwide spread of a new disease.” The last time it named an outbreak as such was in 2009, when the H1N1 influenza sickened nearly a quarter of the global population.
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