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Good Samaritans offer hope as Covid crisis grips Bengaluru
With the piling up of dead bodies outside crematoriums and families running from hospital to hospital to get admission, volunteers have stepped in to help those in dire need.
With Bengaluru struggling to cope up with rising Covid cases, good Samaritans in the city have rolled up their sleeves to extend a helping hand to those in need. Volunteers from various backgrounds such as software industry, business, life sciences, administration and several other sectors are giving it their all in Bengaluru, which has been one of the most impacted cities in the country during the second wave of infections.
On March 22, Rohan Menezes, a graphic designer was desperately looking for beds for his aunt, who had tested positive for the Covid-19. “We had contacted the BBMP but there was no response for hours. Then I put out a request on Twitter and in no time, I received several calls and messages informing me about where I could find a bed. They found my number on Twitter and within a couple of hours, some volunteers were able to get me a bed in a private hospital in Marathahalli,” he said.
The efforts of volunteers, both organised and individuals, had become the key link for dissemination of information, supply of food and other essentials and even helping ferry the large number of migrants who left Bengaluru back to their home states fearing the uncertainty.
Nagendra M was one of the many volunteers who is involved in helping find beds. Nagendra, who works with the civil defence network said that they have been receiving several calls in the past couple of weeks. “The last few days we are getting calls for arranging ventilator beds, oxygen and procurement of drugs like Remdesivir. We also arranged for ambulances and coordinated with our network in other localities for moving people to hospitals and sometimes even for cremation,” he said.
The rapid rise in cases has added to the strain on the inadequate healthcare infrastructure that was left unprepared by the government, who was warned of an imminent second wave in the state in November last year. With the piling up of dead bodies outside crematoriums and families running from hospital to hospital to get admission, volunteers have stepped in to help those in dire need.
In the past few months several NGOs, private groups and individuals came together to form an umbrella group – the Mercy Mission.
“It all started during the first wave with the mercy angels. In the initial days, there was a lot of stigma around burying bodies of Covid patients, so some volunteers came forwards to provide people with an honourable burial. In the second wave, this has expanded with multiple verticals like oxygen supply, providing medicines, arranging ambulances and providing food etc. We also have a call centre now which gets around 5,000 calls a day,” said Syed Tousif Masood, a volunteer with Mercy Mission.
Apart from Mercy Mission, there are several others who help patients, like Sneha Vachhaney who has created a platform for home chefs providing food for those in need. “In the initial days, I was cooking around 50 meals a day to distribute around the area I lived in. Soon, I realised that there was a large demand for meals for those who are in quarantine. Then we put out a call for home chefs and so far around 200 of them have responded,” said Sneha.
Sneha who comes from a corporate background said soon she realised that just cooking meals won’t be enough and her expertise could be used for scaling this process. “With help of my friends, we have created a platform where home chefs can join, and this process is streamlined. We also contacted food delivery companies like Swiggy and Dunzo for our deliveries as the numbers increased,” she said; adding that Bengaluru’s tech background came to help after all.
At the same time, several technology experts and volunteers are trying to help build chatbots and other solutions to streamline the system to ease the pressure on existing infrastructure. A qualified group of persons from Bengaluru among other places like Hyderabad and Coimbatore have created a WhatsApp bot and other technological interventions to complement the existing voice call-based support system for dissemination of Covid-19 information and to reduce the stress on the already overstretched resources.
The team, which comprises Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other software solutions startups, are using their technical expertise to streamline a volume of requests in Bengaluru by collating information and providing a platform to integrate both government and volunteer-driven efforts in order to gain a grip on the pandemic, people aware with the developments said.
“Last time around, there were multiple people trying to solve a problem. Chatbots hadn’t percolated as much but most of the chats happened via WhatsApp as people forwarded everything through the platform. We learnt from that and decided to use WhatsApp as a chatbot-based system. There is no soiling of information, everything is put into a google sheet which every non-profit or CSO (central statistics office) sector person knows how to use,” Gautam Prakash, co-founder and chief problem solver at Reap Benefit, a startup that devises community-based solutions, said.
The WhatsApp bot, which is expected to be rolled out anytime soon, aims to reduce the burden on call centres that have witnessed a three-fold increase in traffic since the beginning of March, as reported by Hindustan Times earlier.
