The global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is pretty much affecting everyone right now, whether you’re having to work from home or take added precautions in your day-to-day life. And as we’ve all been told to stay indoors as much as possible, many companies are doing their bit to help make that transition much easier, offering free game development tutorials or other incentives to keep us entertained at home.

But Nintendo of America has taken things a step further by donating 9,500 N95 respirator masks to North Bend in Washington. The city is the home of the main North American production facility for Nintendo and, according to the statement on North Bend’s official site (via Gamespot), “the masks were originally purchased [by Nintendo] for emergency preparedness planning” within the company. But it seems that Nintendo decided that the masks would be much more useful to the general public and they will be distributed “to address immediate needs”.

Here is a statement from the city’s website:

“North Bend is home to the North American production facility of the world’s largest video gaming company. Nintendo has been ‘Putting Smiles on the Faces of Everyone Nintendo Touches’, according to their Corporate Social Responsibility statement. Today is no different. Nintendo representative Jerry Danson contacted Eastside Fire & Rescue (EF&R) to generously donate over 9,500 N95 Particulate Respirator masks.”

In other (not so heartwarming) Nintendo news, it seems that the predictions for the global shortages of the Switch console were pretty accurate. Back in February, we reported that the spread of the coronavirus was likely to affect the manufacture of Switch consoles as Chinese factories were forced to slow down production. And, according to Gamespot, it seems that Nintendo’s handheld console is now sold out almost everywhere. And if you are lucky enough to find one, you may find the price is higher than normal, due to the high demand.

This really couldn’t have come at a worse time. The launch of has been an undoubted success for Nintendo, as Switch owners everywhere are escaping to their own islands to forget about the current troubles. But for those of us that don’t own a Switch – or hadn’t thought about picking one up until very recently – it looks like you might have to wait a while longer.

But to end on a slightly lighter note, a couple opted to hold their wedding ceremony in-game in after their real-life wedding was cancelled because of the outbreak. While I’m sure it’s not the quite how they’d imagined their big day would be, I’m pretty confident that it worked out much cheaper. And hey, at least they got to avoid that one uncle with the embarrassing drunk dance.