A 34-year-old Indian American Sikh doctor has returned home and is helping India contain the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Harmandeep Singh Boparai was working as a frontline worker in New York, United States but is now treating COVID patients in his home town Amritsar.

After this, he will start to treat covid patients at a 1000 bed hospital in Mumbai where he has been roped in by Doctors without Borders, an international medical humanitarian organization. He is all set to serve the hospital for the next few weeks.

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Dr. Harman is a specialist in anaesthesiology and critical care. He completed his MBBS in Amritsar Government Medical College before moving to New York in 2011. He has also imparted training to many doctors and nurses in the city. He returned to India this year to help people fight back the virus.

Harman said, “As soon as I came back to India, though the cases were not so high at the time, I started talking to the doctors here on how we can build capacity in case cases surge, apart from strengthening the infrastructure to handle any kind of crisis. Soon enough, we saw a catastrophic rises in the cases in India. I have been able to build a capacity for intensive care at Dukh Niwaran Hospital, besides imparting training to the nurses and doctors regarding the Covid protocol that I learnt in New York during the first wave.”

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Talking about India’s COVID situation, “We have not been able to contain the spread of the virus for various reasons here, even though we had time to prepare for the bad waves as were seen across the world earlier. We could have vaccinated many more people so far. But, due to issues in the system, help couldn’t reach many in time.”

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He said, “Doctors in the health department, especially in Punjab, have been working so hard in order to save lives. We must continue to support them and give them our best wishes and solidarity, for this is not an easy job.”

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