Billionaire Joseph Tsai gives San Diego $1.6 million in critical medical supplies to fight Covid-19

A Chinese billionaire who gave New York a huge cache of medical supplies to help the state fight COVID-19 is making a similar gift to greater San Diego, where his family has lived for seven years.

Joseph Tsai and his wife, Clara, have donated 500,000 medical-grade masks and goggles to UC San Diego, which will use and share the equipment with the region's health care systems and hospitals, and possibly other areas of California.

Some of the $1.6 million in supplies are being rushed to Sharp Medical Center Chula Vista, which has a critical need for the equipment.

Tsai imported the supplies from China, where he built his fortune as co-founder of Alibaba, the world's largest e-commerce company. He is the firm's executive vice chairman. Tsai also owns sports franchises, including the NBA's Brooklyn Nets and the San Diego Seals, a professional lacrosse team.

He partners with Clara on many things, including this; she was key to hammering out the donation.

"We really wanted to help the front-line workers," Clara Tsai told the Union-Tribune on Saturday. "Largely our plan is (to send the supplies) to UCSD hospitals, Sharp, Scripps, Palomar, Kaiser and the VA.

"If there's extra (supplies) to warehouse or prepare for the future, great. But we need these things to be used now where they're needed. If that happens to be L.A., Santa Monica, that's where it needs to go."

Special attention was paid to importing 130,000 goggles.

"Our experience of watching this unfold in China is that front-line hospital workers can get infected through not just the nose and mouth, but also through their eyes," Joseph Tsai said.

The donated medical supplies are arriving in San Diego at a time when social distancing is helping curb the spread of the coronavirus. But the number of infections countywide continues to rise, reaching more than 2,200 on Sunday. And deaths have surpassed 70, say county health officials.

The gift arose from a simple email. Clara Tsai contacted UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla and asked how she and her husband could help the region. She's on one of the chancellor's advisory boards.

The couple cited the same interest in early April when they donated 2,000 ventilators, 170,000 goggles and 2.6 million masks to New York, which has been hit harder than any other state by the coronavirus.

Khosla was searching for help at the very moment the Tsai family reached out.

"My (goal) is protecting our front-line folks, who I think of as first responders," Khosla said. "What good is an open ICU bed if you don't have a doctor or nurse to deal with it?

"This equipment is invaluable as our region prepares for a likely surge in the number of patients during the COVID-19 pandemic."

The Tsai family said Khosla was a good choice to handle the logistics because he has a deep understanding of the problem.

"He very quickly understood how important testing was, and is," Joseph Tsai said. "We still have a shortage of tests, which is really creating a huge amount of anxiety and confusion about getting everybody back to work.

"If we had more tests available we could properly identify, isolate and trace people and help the economy get back on its feet sooner."

Though there has been a steady flow of newly hospitalized patients with severe symptoms who have sometimes required multi-week stays in intensive care units, the number hospitalized at any one time has never come close to eclipsing the local supply of beds, which exceeds 7,000.

As of Friday, the county reported that more than 500 mechanical ventilators were available for patients in severe respiratory distress. The region's broad-based social distancing campaign seems so far to have staved off a situation where local hospitals would be inundated and overwhelmed.

But there have been reports from the region's two southernmost hospitals, Sharp Medical Center Chula Vista and Scripps Mercy Hospital Chula Vista, that the rate of new cases in the South Bay is rising faster than it is across the rest of the region.

That has led to discussions among public health officials about the possibility of moving patients from the southern reaches to facilities farther north.

Joseph Tsai isn't widely known to the American public. But he is one of the richest and most influential figures involved in the global effort to defeat COVID-19.

He was born in Taipei, Taiwan, the son of a lawyer. Tsai later moved to the U.S., attending boarding school in New Jersey before moving on to Yale, where he earned a law degree and a degree in economics.

He moved to Hong Kong, where he specialized in private equity investments. Tsai later became friends with Chinese investor Jack Ma. In 1999, they co-founded Alibaba and have helped to revolutionize e-commerce. Forbes recently estimated Tsai's wealth as $11.3 billion.

Tsai has invested a lot of money in buying and developing sports franchises, including the New York Liberty of the WNBA. The purchases reflect the deep passion that many Chinese people have for professional basketball. Some of that passion is tied to Chinese-born Yao Ming, who became a superstar while playing for the NBA's Houston Rockets.

That love was tested in October when Daryl Morey, the Rocket's general manager, posted a tweet that said, "Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong."

The message came just as two NBA teams were about to play in China, and it infuriated the Chinese people.

Tsai addressed the matter in a statement posted to Facebook. He defended free speech, but added, "The one thing that is terribly misunderstood, and often ignored, by the western press and those critical of China is that 1.4 billion Chinese citizens stand united when it comes to the territorial integrity of China and the country's sovereignty over her homeland. This issue is non-negotiable."

The Tsais became summer residents of San Diego in 2002, when Clara's parents moved to La Jolla. They continued to visit each summer until 2013, when most of the Tsais moved here as well. Joseph Tsai primarily resides in Hong Kong, but regularly commutes back to San Diego.

"San Diego appeals to us because we love the California weather," Joseph Tsai said. "But we also love the fact that it is a very community-oriented town. It's not massive like L.A., where you have to drive everywhere. It's also got a lot more diversity than the Bay Area.

"I'm in the technology business. I spend quite a bit of time in Silicon Valley. You kind of run into the same people over and over. It's very homogeneous. But San Diego has a lot of diversity."

The Tsai's have become deeply involved with local institutions, particularly UCSD's 21st Century China Center Program to promote better relations between the U.S. and China.

The program is chaired by research professor Susan Shirk, who said on Saturday, "At a time when the U.S. and Chinese governments are so at odds that they seem unable to coordinate their efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, we are fortunate that private philanthropists and universities are stepping up to help save lives in both countries and throughout the world."

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