Indians in the US and COVID-19 back home

Hi, this is Kartikay. In the U.S., Covid-19 is in retreat. But for those with relatives in India, a group that represents a significant proportion of America’s technology workers, they’re now fighting a distant war.

India’s Covid outbreak is the worst in the world. The country saw a record 3,780 deaths on Wednesday, and researchers say the toll could grow significantly worse. In the U.S., the tech industry has grown increasingly reliant on Indian workers over the last decade. Indians have claimed a majority of the more than 2 million H-1B visas the U.S. has issued since 2005, in many cases going on to join Silicon Valley companies. That’s left thousands of tech workers desperate to help family back home, and often, helpless to do so.

For Mudita Tiwari, the first sign of concern came in a phone call with her mom on April 16. Tiwari, a product director at PayPal Holdings Inc. in Cupertino, California, learned that her father, Atul, had a low-grade fever and seasonal allergies. Tiwari’s instincts told her to get her parents out of India, but Dad’s symptoms were mild, and headlines about a Covid-19 catastrophe in South Asia were still about a week away. She decided to let her parents wait for their second dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Two days later, the 71-year-old’s condition worsened. His fever spiked to 101 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), and he’d developed a cough. The family assumed the worst and started seeking out remedies. Tiwari asked PayPal for a leave of absence, took a Covid test and booked the first flight to New Delhi on her way to Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.

“I just started throwing money at the problem,” Tiwari said. “I cannot imagine what it’s like for the millions of people going through this same trauma, but without the means to pay for care or isolation.” She added: “There was no other solution, and sitting and waiting was no longer an option.”

Indians are the richest ethnicity in the U.S., with a median income of $132,000, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Much of their wealth is generated by workers in the tech industry, the institute found. But even those in the most successful and privileged corners of tech’s Indian diaspora have quickly discovered the limits of their ability to save loved ones from a disaster rooted in faltering infrastructure and insufficient health care staffing.

It took until a week after the initial phone call for Tiwari to receive her negative test result and reserve a first-class ticket to India, the only one available. One of the last messages she saw before takeoff was in her family WhatsApp group saying her father’s blood-oxygen level had plummeted. They shared a tearful goodbye over video chat in which she begged him to “just breathe and keep breathing,” she said.
“As soon as I landed in Delhi, I saw that my family had taken him to a hospital,” Tiwari said. “He’d said goodbye to my mom and gone into cardiac arrest.”

For the next week, she performed her father’s last rites. Local rules prohibited her from approaching his body in the hospital, so she watched as he was packed into a black body bag and loaded into the back of a van headed to the crematorium. There, she stood at a distance as her father’s body was offered to an open pyre, the smoke billowing from each additional corpse. She was not allowed to take his ashes home with her.

The death made Tiwari’s new mission immediately clear: Get Mom out of India. She helped her mother, Shail, pack bags and check into a hotel for a weeklong quarantine. Tiwari quickly sorted through her parents’ belongings for any critical documents before she, too, locked down at the same hotel in a nearby room. After a week of isolation, she bought a pair of airplane tickets and fled.

Mother and daughter spent their first week in Cupertino in quarantine, Tiwari in her apartment and her mom in an Airbnb down the round. They grieved alone. BloombergQuint