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Comment by MarkMc | Hacker News Reader

Suppose I know of a number of people in India who have covid symptoms and difficulty breathing but cannot get treatment in any hospital due to overcrowding. As someone who lives in a Western country, what is the most effective way to help them?

I could simply send them money, but they might use it to bribe hospital staff for treatment, or outbid other people for oxygen cannisters. They would benefit but other people would lose out.

Maybe I should buy medicine in my home country and send it to them? Or maybe buy oxygen concentrator machines on Alibaba and have them shipped to India?

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Late reply, but Vox had a piece on this a couple days ago, "Here are the most effective ways to donate to help India": https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22432413/india-donate-cov...

Maybe one somewhat-helpful simple thing you could send them would be a pulse oximeter. If they need to get to a hospital and can't get in, it won't help them much, but it might in some cases be helpful to at least have a thing that at least tells them if they're getting better or worse.

Another option is maybe send them a decent quality room air filter if they're in a city with heavy pollution, so it's one less thing for their lungs to deal with.

It's kind of a tough question; I'm neither a doctor nor have I been around anyone who has gotten Covid, so I don't really know first-hand what's most helpful.

For the most part, India's fate over the next month is sealed. It was like when people got really excited about making ventilators, they were already a month late.

Thanks mark for wonderful thought but money won't solve issues India facing. There are multiple problems. I think most important thing is to educate rural people about why they need to follow guidelines strictly. Many people refuses vaccines because they think it is elobrate plan to eliminate them. So education is the way govt.can move forward.

The comment wasn't asking how to solve problems for all of India, but how to help some people he knows who are in India.

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