Paul Hope is an engineer who developed the Virustatic Shield, a fabric snood face covering with an anti viral protein coating which traps and disables certain viruses. Mr Hope was inspired to begin work on developing the snood and protein technology after the SARS epidemic in 2010. His grandfather had died of Spanish Flu in 1919 and Mr Hope believed that another pandemic flu was inevitable. After ten years of development and seeing Covid 19 starting to spread across the world, Virustatic pushed through the final stages of development to bring the snood to market in March 2020, in the hope that the protein would prove effective against respiratory viruses other than flu.