American doctor dies after travelling to India to help with Covid

Wednesday 12th May 2021 07:12 EDT
 
 

New Jersey: Dr Rajendra Kapila, 81, was an infectious disease expert at New Jersey’s Rutgers University. He died in a Delhi hospital on 28 April after several weeks of treatment for Covid-related complications. Kapila’s widow Dr Deepti Saxena-Kapila, herself a scientist working on the pandemic, said the couple travelled together to India in the last week of March.

“For the last one year I have been working at a Covid-19 lab in New Jersey and had ensured a safe environment at home,” said Dr Deepti, who specialises in microbiology. “It is ironic that we came to India for two weeks and he contracted it here.” The newspaper quoted Dr Deepti as saying they had both been fully vaccinated with two Pfizer-BioNTech shots, though this was not immediately confirmed by Kapila’s university. Rutgers University’s chair of the department of medicine Dr Marc Klapholz sent a statement via email to colleagues, which was later also shared online, saying Dr Kapila had been a foundational pillar of the New Jersey Medical School for 50 years.

“A genuine giant in the field of infectious diseases, Dr Kapila was recognised worldwide and sought out for his legendary knowledge and extraordinary clinical acumen in diagnosing and treating the most complex infectious diseases,” the email said. “ He will be deeply and genuinely missed.”

Kapila’s ex-wife, Dr Bina Kapila, said in an interview that the doctor, who had underlying conditions of diabetes and heart complications, travelled to India to care for his family. "He was so brilliant when we were in college, in medical school, that the professors of medicine after they gave a lecture, they would come to him and ask him, ‘did I cover everything?’" she said.

Dr Kapila had reportedly planned to return to the US in mid-April but tested positive for Covid-19 on 8 April before he was admitted to Delhi’s Shanti Mukund Hospital, where he died 20 days later. “Whenever Dr Kapila visited India, he would deliver lectures to fellow doctors at major private hospitals in the city and never said ‘no’ to an opportunity to teach,” Dr Ruby Bansal, of India’s Yashoda Super Speciality Hospital at Kaushambi, said.


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