UPDATE: Please donate directly to the GiveIndia Fundraiser: https://fundraisers.giveindia.org/fundraisers/provide-urgent-oxygen-supply-to-critical-covid-patients-in-india instead of this GoFundMe going forwards as that will ensure an immediate availability of funds for the GiveIndia NGO. There is a delay in receiving funds with GoFundMe and requires an extra step of transferring the funds.
Just a brief summary again: GiveIndia is working with trusted non-governmental NGOs such as Doctors For You, Helping Hands Charitable Trust, and Project Mumbai for this Oxygen for India campaign to build Oxygen Generation Plants and provide Oxygen Concentrators, Oxygen Cylinders, Bipaps, Ventilators, and Covid Care Centers in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and other cities.
GiveIndia conducts rigorous checks , including Compliance, Monitoring, Impact Verification, and Legal Verification. They channel resources to credible, non-governmental organizations across India for the donor’s chosen cause, in this case, providing life-saving equipment to support critical patients and health workers to fight COVID-19 in India. They would send our funds directly to Doctors For You, Helping Hands Charitable Trust and Project Mumbai within a week.
The funds for the GiveIndia Oxygen for India Campaign (bit.ly/oxygenforindia) will go towards:
- Setting up oxygen generation plants in hospitals/Covid facility compounds in Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and Patna. A 5,000-litre capacity plant is being setup in these cities that can support 650 people per day
- Providing oxygen concentrators which use oxygen from the air and convert it to medical grade oxygen. A patient in need of a concentrator needs to be on it for 5-7 days. One oxygen concentrator costs ₹55,000
- Providing oxygen cylinders that help a person in need of oxygen support for 5-7 days. The B-type (1,500L) oxygen cylinder costs ₹15,000 while the D-type (6,000L) costs ₹25,000
- Refilling oxygen cylinders, as manufacture is restricted to certain states and transporting oxygen cylinders from one state to another requires specific vehicles which are not very widely available in the given situation. Refilling A B-type cylinder costs ₹800/refill and D-type costs ₹2,500/refill
-Providing Bipaps which are also known as non-invasive ventilation. One Bipap costs approximately ₹60,000
-Providing ventilators which are priced at ₹5 lakh per item
-Setting up Covid Care Centres: In partnership with state governments of Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, GiveIndia is helping set up Covid Care Centers to treat mild to moderate (non-ICU) Covid patients through quality care
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* India has been reporting the world’s highest one day surges in COVID-19 cases. Its healthcare system is crumbling, and its resources for its critical patients are almost gone. One year ago, New York was similarly debilitated by COVID-19. However, it was able to quickly recover due to an ample amount of resources provided.
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“Give him a hospital bed, or just kill him with an injection,” said Sagar Kishore Naharshetivar in regards to his father, who was lying in the back of the van hooked up to an oxygen tank, suffering from Covid-19. Within the past week, Sagar and his father had gone to hospitals in three different towns and different states, but had no luck. Every hospital told them the same thing:
“The hospital is full.”
Why would anyone want their father to be killed? What is this acute, severe breathlessness Sagar's father is experiencing?
Imagine how it feels when you dive in a deep swimming pool and swim towards the surface desperate for a breath of air, with that excruciating frantic anticipation to take a breath and a bursting feeling inside your chest. Now imagine that, except for hours and hours on end while you are waiting in a hot, uncomfortable backseat of a car, in an ambulance, in a never ending line, in a parking lot, or while being shuttled back and forth between hospitals that cannot accept you.
This is how thousands of people in India with COVID-19 are suffering and dying at the moment, most due to a preventable cause of a lack of resources.
Oxygen, PCR kits, life-saving injections, PPE, hospital beds, and more supplies are running out by the minute. When an oxygen tank in Nashik burst, a grandson said his grandmother died within 10 minutes of the break in supply.
Medical professionals are getting sick and sidelined. Hospitals are overfull. Dr. Trupti Gilada said, “I have never felt so desperate or helpless.”
“Right now there are no beds, no oxygen," said Shahid Jameel, virologist and director of the Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University,
This traumatized daughter drove over two hours to Ranchi, Jharkhand and had to wait in the hospital’s parking lot for 30 minutes, desperately calling for doctors while watching her father painfully die without anyone there to help. By the time help arrived, her father had already passed away.
India recorded the world's highest daily new COVID-19 infections on April 21, 2022: 314,835 cases.
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Why should we care? We don’t even know these people, thousands of miles away, unrelated to us.
Will we be remembered as the country and people who stood aside, with their vaccinations complete, going on about their regular lives as though nothing is going on, as India falls apart?
Will we let the virus proliferate and mutate unfettered as it becomes exceedingly dangerous, and eventually comes back to us, more easily penetrating through our vaccines defenses, and this time, severely affecting the youth as well as the elderly, as it is doing in India?
No, we cannot stand by and watch another country crumble when we have the potential to help.
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Please consider sharing this GoFundMe Campaign and donating. Your donations will provide life-saving equipment to support critical patients and health workers to fight COVID-19 in India.
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We have all lost loved ones due to COVID-19 and among the countless COVID-19 victims is my grandmother, Lata Sanghavi. This campaign is dedicated in her memory and all those who have passed away from COVID-19. We love you, baa and you will forever be in our hearts.
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