Indian American family of five doctors lose father and daughter physicians to Covid-19

TNN, May 8, 2020, WASHINGTON: An Indian-American family of five doctors lost the father and one daughter, both physicians in New Jersey, to Covid-19 in a tragedy that also underscores the danger from the virus to frontline healthcare warriors, some 25 per cent of whom are immigrants.

Dr Priya Khanna, a nephrologist, and her father Dr Satyender Dev Khanna, a surgeon, died on April 13 and April 21 respectively after contracting the coronavirus, two of scores of physicians who have been felled by the pandemic. Their deaths were publicly announced on Thursday by New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who praised the family’s dedication to health and medicine, and said his administration would "commit in their memory to saving as many lives as we can."New Jersey, a state with a large Indian-American community, has lost more than 8000 people to the coronavirus pandemic, the second highest in the country after New York.

Priya Khanna, who had received her medical degree from Kansas City School of Medicine in 2003, was infected by the virus late March or early April, and her condition had turned serious soon after. “Plasma donor needed urgently for my beautiful young sister who dedicated her life to helping others,” her sister Dr Suganda Khanna tweeted on April 8.

They found a donor with a day, but five days later the family announced Priya’s death, saying, “Our beautiful Priya passed away 4/13/20 at 3:27am. She was the light in our family with the heart of gold and had a infectious smile! A piece of our heart is gone and will be forever missed.”

Dr Satyender Khanna, who was also infected by this time, died a week later. “Our loving and caring father, Dr. Satyender Dev Khanna, passed today to be with my sister Priya. He was a gentle soul and loved deeply by his girls. My dad loved to bike along the water,” Dr Anisha Khanna said in social media post on April 21. A photo of Dr Khanna showed him biking along the Jersey shore with the Statue of Liberty in the background.

The Khannas are widely known in the Indian community as a rare all-physician family. Dr Satyender Dev Khanna’s wife Dr. Kamlesh Khanna is a pediatrician, and of Priya's two sisters, Dr. Suganda Khanna is an emergency medicine physician, and Dr. Anisha Khanna-Sharma is a pediatrician.

Dr Satyendra Dev Khanna graduated from New Delhi’s Maulana Azad Medical College in 1964 and came to the U.S in 1966 with six dollars in his pocket in what constitutes a Indian immigrant template from the sixties. “He didn’t even know if he had enough money for the taxi ride from Newark Airport to Elizabeth General Hospital, where he was to start his internship and live. But my dad had his degree in Medicine – this was priceless,” Priya and Anisha wrote in the Good Health journal of the Clara Maas Medical Center in NJ, where he worked for 35 years.

The daughters recalled how they followed their parents into medicine because it was simply a part of their daily lives since they were children. “My mom and dad opened their practice on the side of our home. We used to help out in the office every summer and volunteered at Clara Maas Medical Center in the 6th and 7th grades. My mom and dad have been on the staff at CMMC for as long as I can remember,” they wrote.

The father and daughter will be there forever, in a sense; both died at CMMC.