PRESIDENT'S COLUMN
Read archives from AAN Past President Orly Avitzur, MD, MBA, FAAN, who served from May 2021 to April 2023.
July 2021
As US Restrictions Ease, India Enduring COVID Horrors
As I sit down to write this column in early June, the US continues to experience fewer COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, 52 percent of Americans have had at least one COVID-19 vaccine, and 42 percent have been fully vaccinated. The CDC has loosened its recommendations for vaccinees, and our organization is beginning to plan for future in-person meetings.
India has been far less fortunate. When the outbreak ebbed this past winter, safety measures were relaxed, and India began to return to pre-pandemic activities such as recreational events, political rallies, and religious festivals. Now, it is experiencing its second surge of COVID-19, one much worse than its first, and its medical community has been almost entirely deployed to care for the nation’s growing number of hospitalized patients. More than 1,300 doctors have died of COVID since the pandemic started, including 646 since the second wave started in March. There were 414,188 new cases on May 6—a record high at that point—and almost 4,000 deaths a day. Only 14 percent of its population has been vaccinated, 244 million people, and only three percent are fully vaccinated.
The American Academy of Neurology has over 900 members living in India, second in number to Canada among our international members. There are also about 1,000 Indian American neurologists working as our colleagues in the US, according to Sanjay P. Singh, MD, FAAN, FANA, chair of neurology at Creighton University School of Medicine. When I first started reading about India as part of a story in our pandemic series for Neurology Today®, I learned from half a dozen of our members who live and work in various parts of India that the nation is comprised of complex and decentralized health systems, and many of its inhabitants suffer from multidimensional deprivation. About 28 percent of its population of 1.37 billion lived in poverty—before the pandemic struck. Magnified by gaping disparities by caste, class, and gender in access to health care, a premature reopening after its first surge, a vaccine rollout which has yet to fully vaccinate 97 percent of its inhabitants, and new variants which help the virus evade the immune defenses, India is in crisis.
In effort to address the tremendous strain on medical facilities, health care professionals, and the health care infrastructure, the Association of Indian Neurologists in America (AINA) launched an online fundraiser on April 30; all funds raised go to Sewa International, a humanitarian, nonprofit service organization registered in the US. It has focused on the country’s most urgent need—medical supplies—and has procured over 5,000 oxygen concentrators, 250 ventilators, and over 20,000 pulse oximeters and distributed over 4,000 kits of medicines to health care personnel. To date, the AINA has raised and released $31,800, more than half of its goal of $50,000 through donations.
"More than half of India’s neurologists are functioning like general practitioners taking care of COVID patients, day and night, without breaks, in personal protective equipment, changing their masks, and going right back in, over and over again," said Dr. Singh, who expressed how proud he is of the efforts of Indian neurologists and all physicians there. A veteran of three successful missions between 2016 and 2019 to deliver on-site medical care to rural India and train local physicians alongside a medical group of specialists from Omaha, NE, Dr. Singh and his colleagues are now exploring continuing their volunteer work through telemedicine. They are working with the state governments in India again, this time to deliver remote care to small hospitals which lack specialists such as neurologists.
US neurologists have ties to many other nations around the world, and as the COVID-19 pandemic showed, our fates are intertwined. We have learned a great deal from each other as we struggled to combat the virus and understand its neurologic sequelae and will continue to develop our knowledge of science, epidemiology, and public health from lessons shared with one another. "This crisis makes clear the need for global solidarity and sharing of resources to prevent new infections and provide essential medical treatment to affected individuals,” said Jerome H. Chin, MD, PhD, MPH, FAAN, chair of the AAN International Subcommittee. "As we witness the positive gains in the US and other high-income countries against the spread of the virus, our optimism is tempered by the worsening situation in other parts of the world.”
Those who wish to donate funds for medical care in India may do so by contacting the AINA at 4aina.com. If you are registered to practice neurology in India and would like to help provide telehealth care, you may contact Dr. Singh by email at SanjaySingh@creighton.edu. To connect with colleagues across the globe, join the SynapseSM Online Community for international members.
Orly Avitzur, MD, MBA, FAAN
President, AAN
@OrlyA on Twitter