New cases of COVID-19 are exploding in India, and there isn’t any way to prevent everyone there from being exposed. There are not enough Covid vaccines available to vaccinate over a billion people in India, and it will be months before enough vaccines will be manufactured even to become available. The medical facilities are already running out of oxygen to treat infected people. What is available won’t come close to serving the huge numbers of people who will soon be infected and need oxygen to keep them alive. What is the obvious solution?

Good quality face masks are the one proven thing that is available and can be delivered to all of those people in a few days. Large quantities of face masks already exist around the world. India probably does have face masks right now, but not nearly enough to cope with the coming surge in cases. American adults who have already had the Covid vaccine shots and have extra face masks will no longer be needing them and could give those masks to people in India who desperately need them. There are commercial airplane flights to India from US airports that take less than 24 hours to make the trip, and we could fly many masks to India before the surge peaks. The masks are available here, but they don’t become effective until the moment they are worn over there. Sufficient Covid vaccines are not available in India. They don’t become effective for two weeks or more and not fully effective for a month until after the second shot. Even if a person gets the Covid vaccine shot today, it won’t be fully effective until the present Covid surge has grown to horrible dimensions.

Masks now sitting unneeded here in the US today could be on people’s faces tomorrow in India. The collection of them and the distribution of them is only a question of American people doing it. That problem is easily resolved by people in the media presenting the problem and the solution to the public. 

The US government could purchase the existing supply of masks and ship them immediately to the government in India. The people of America could take their unused masks to the Covid vaccine distribution centers where the communications are already in place distributing Covid vaccines and send the masks back through those communication lines. 

Even easier, an individual could take their unused masks and send them through existing mail to hospitals in India. Here is the Google search for Hospitals in India. 

You could have the satisfaction of sending your masks to specific places and actually see pictures of people wearing the masks you gave them.