These Sacramento doctors are raising money to help India through its deadly COVID spike
Sacramento-based doctors of Indian descent are raising money to send oxygen to that country as a sudden spike in COVID-19 rates has led to thousands of deaths daily and overwhelmed medical facilities there.
“You see the difference between the two health-care systems (of the U.S. and India) … Then you hear (about) people who are dying on the street because they can’t even get into the hospital,” said Dr. Manoj Mittal, an ICU physician at Sutter General Hospital. “How do you even comprehend that?”
Mittal is a board member of United Visions International, the Sacramento organization that’s trying to get more oxygen to people in India. The goal is to raise $255,000 to purchase 300 oxygen concentrators — devices that extract oxygen from the air to send a limitless supply through ventilators.
India has suffered a major surge in COVID infections since March after seeing a decline last winter. An estimated 4,187 people died Saturday, the country’s highest daily death rate yet, bringing the estimated total number of deaths to nearly 240,000.
The surge has stretched India’s medical facilities to their limit. Some medical experts, including the physicians at UVI, have said that the country’s official reported number of COVID-related deaths is a severe undercount.
As of Monday, UVI has raised more than $79,000. All the money raised will go toward purchasing concentrators, with UVI covering the cost of vendor fees.
Unlike large international organizations that sometimes have only vague outlines for how they use public donations, UVI has established a clear pipeline. They’re working directly with their alumni network at University College of Medical Sciences School to get the concentrators to Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital in New Delhi.
Oxygen concentrators, designed mostly for those with moderate breathing problems, won’t save people with the most extreme cases. But they can prevent those with less severe cases from getting worse or help those recovering to heal at home, freeing up ICU beds.
If this fundraiser is successful, said Dr. Prabjit Singh, a UVI co-founder who also works at Sutter, the organization will raise more money to meet India’s next set of needs. Families need transportation to hospitals, morgue workers need more protective equipment and orphaned children will need support, Singh said.
“At this point, we want to save lives as soon as possible,” Singh said. “We want to get (oxygen) to our people as soon as possible. The need may change 30 days from now, but right now, this is the need.”
Sending oxygen to a global community
Sacramento’s Indian American community has watched with horror as COVID has ravaged India over the past few weeks, physicians said. India’s hospitals were ill-prepared for the increase, brought about by new variants of the virus.
The virus’ spread has also been accelerated because many families in India lack the means to properly isolate family members. Hospitals and morgues have been overflowing, Mittal said, with people lining up just to arrange for their loved ones to be cremated or buried.
To put the official report of more than 4,000 deaths per day into perspective, the number of people dying each day in India is about a third more than the 9-11 attacks, Mittal said.
“I’ve never read about or thought about anything like that in my life,” Mittal said. “You have all these (experimental) medicines (for COVID) … but right now people are dying because they don’t even have oxygen.”
Mittal’s father caught COVID-19, but recovered under Mittal’s strict eye. He leveraged other family members and friends with instructions on how to care for his father, overseeing everything remotely over voice and video calls until his father recovered. But few have access to this level of care in India, he said.
“My schoolmate’s father passed away. His mother was sick and couldn’t get a bed,” Mittal said. “I’m scared to call him because I think he’s going to say she’s not there anymore.”
More than half a million people of Asian Indian descent live in California as of 2010, and many in Sacramento’s Asian American community still have ties to loved ones overseas. Singh also added that, given how quickly new COVID variants can spread, protecting Americans in the U.S. requires protecting people elsewhere.
Supporting India’s residents means supporting a global community, UVI’s physicians said, and urged Sacramentans to contribute to relief efforts in any way possible.
“This can happen everywhere. … There will be more outbreaks in other countries,” Singh said. “We want to be safe here in the United States, too, and the only way we can be safe here is if we stop it in India.”
This story was originally published May 11, 2021 at 5:00 AM.