NYC medical workers raise over $100K in GoFundMe campaign

New Yorkers are opening their hearts and wallets to hospital workers desperately trying to find the supplies they need to protect themselves from the coronavirus pandemic.

An online fundraising campaign to get much-needed gear to New York City emergency rooms during the coronavirus crisis has reached its goal of $100,000 — in just two days.

“It is amazing,” said Sumanth Kaja, an emergency medicine physician at NYU Langone, who launched the GoFundMe page. “We’re seeing so many people are trying to help even when times are rough.”

The city’s public and private hospitals face astonishing shortages of gear and desperately searching to find 3 million ‘N95’ masks and another 50 million surgical masks, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tuesday.

As hospitals are inundated by sick people citywide, Kaja set up the fundraising page on Monday to help buy masks, gowns, and face shields for his colleagues at Bellevue and NYU Langone hospitals.

By Wednesday, it had raised more than $106,000 from roughly 1,350 donors.

“To watch how everybody is [rallying] to respond wherever they can has been really inspiring,” said Kaja of East Fishkill.

“[We are] seeing hundreds of COVID cases every day,” the fundraising page states. “One of the biggest problems we face is the lack of personal protective equipment – N95 masks, gowns, and face shields…We currently have less than one week’s worth of supply remaining.”

The funds will go to protecting medical staff in Emergency and ICU units at Emergency Medicine Resident Physicians at Bellevue and NYU Langone Hospital, Kaja said.

He plans to keep the GoFundMe page up even though it has gone over its goal. It wasn’t immediately clear how long $100,000 worth of medical supplies would last.