Here’s how we are trying to help during the COVID-19 pandemic
Our country is navigating through a worst kind of pandemic. The current situation is not unknown to us. While few run around the city to get a life support for shortness of breath, few others are on phone searching through their contacts to get beds and oxygen for their dear ones.
A few days ago, couple of us were on phone to find a bed for a relative whose oxygen saturation was way below a normal range. We tried calling any and many hospitals in Kolkata — called for more than 5 hours without getting any positive response. Most of the time the numbers shared on social media were un-reachable. The difficulty was clearly visible, it wasn’t a horror story from children books anymore. We could imagine the pain faced by so many people across the city and country as a whole.
A group of friends got together and decided we would go through all the contacts that are circulating in the social media, and call them one by one and see which one are genuine. We would only keep them and circulate those among the needy ones. And hence this idea gave birth to https://cov-aid.github.io/resource/ — a portal where contacts for oxygen, beds, hospitals and vaccines are updated real time (by a bunch of volunteers). We call the source every day and update the information based on their response.
This portal provides information for Kolkata only as of now. For pan India, this site should be useful https://indiacovidresources.in/ (Please do note that most information available on the website is vetted by third parties. So you might have to do some due diligence before transacting with these suppliers)
We hope our sincere efforts are of use to the families in need and we also pray that our efforts are rewarded hereafter.
If you want to contribute as a volunteer, then please fill up this form — Google Form