The urgent pleas for help from Rohit Mediratta’s family and friends in India began a few weeks ago. Then his brother, a neurosurgeon in New Delhi, said that his hospital had canceled most surgeries after running low on oxygen.
Mr. Mediratta, a tech company director of engineering who lives in Palo Alto, Calif., said he and his wife, Kanika, felt compelled to act. She found a supplier of oxygen concentrators, which filter oxygen from the air, that was willing to ship immediately to India. They raised more than half a million dollars from a GoFundMe campaign, and on Tuesday the first batch of 140 concentrators arrived at a field hospital in Delhi.
“India is essentially a medical war zone,” Mr. Mediratta said. “It’s heart-wrenching that we can only do so much.”
As India struggles with the pandemic’s fastest-growing Covid-19 surge, one of the world’s largest diasporas is mobilizing aid, including many Indian-Americans. On Thursday, India reported more than 412,000 new daily cases, a global single-day high for the pandemic, and nearly 4,000 deaths.
There are about four million Americans of Indian descent, and many are donating to nonprofits that are shipping critical medical supplies to India and searching for vendors to send equipment.
