Community-driven helplines for COVID-19
With people across the country undergoing home isolation or taking care of someone suffering from COVID-19, home chefs and restaurant owners have stepped up to provide them with fresh meals.
With people across the country undergoing home isolation or taking care of someone suffering from COVID-19, home chefs and restaurant owners have stepped up to provide them with fresh meals.
Kitchen of Flavours is one such community of home chefs, professional chefs, and celebrity chefs, which is providing hygienic, homemade, and fresh food to COVID-19 patients free of cost.
The community has about 30 home chefs across different cities, including Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Meerut, Lucknow, Faridabad, Jaipur, Jhalawar, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Assam.
Founded by Ramesh Balasundaram and Binu Verma, Bengaluru-based Bal Utsav’s disaster response programme ‘Operation Dayitva’ uses technology to understand needs on the ground and deliver critical supplies during times of need.
At present, it is planning to open a 100-bed ‘Bharat Covid Care Centre,’ which will work as a feeder to an existing hospital.
It will use existing playgrounds, large parking lots, auditoriums, schools, community centres, and empty grounds to set these up, which can function for the next 90-120 days.
“This will address the issue of lack of infrastructure, while various initiatives are currently underway to increase the number of medical personnel,” Ramesh says.
In fact, he says that the NGO’s pandemic efforts have supported over 30,000 families, where it distributed stay-at-home food kits, hygiene kits, drinking water, and PPE kits for frontline staff, sanitary napkins for women, and oral rehydration solution for children.
To help people looking to locate hospital beds and find oxygen cylinders, plasma, medicines, and other such resources, Divyaansh Anuj and Utkarsh Roy built IntroBot, a WhatsApp AI community chatbot that shares real-time, verified leads.
You can also use Verified Covid Leads (VCL), a platform that aggregates verified data from different sources for people to access easily. The platform is built by Lucknow-based serial entrepreneur Shrishti Sahu after she failed to get reliable help when 18 members of her family, including herself, were infected by COVID-19.
Read about how the Indian startup ecosystem is battling the second wave of COVID-19 here.
Here are some useful tools and links that can help you find the nearest vaccine centres in real-time.
The Interview
MIT students Shriya Srinivasan and Rajib Mondal's Project Prana is making multiplex ventilators called iSave that will be priced at Rs 45,000. Made out of Chennai, these ventilators can connect one ventilator to two patients, be customised, and control the parameters. Read more.
Editor’s Pick: Startups fight COVID-19: ShakeDeal
Amid the devastating second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bengaluru-based B2B ecommerce marketplace ShakeDeal has been ramping up efforts to extend its support to its customers and employees.
It has launched project SamRaksha (“Safe Together”) for all its employees and their immediate families. In fact, it is supplying sanitisers in various packaging quantities — from 100 mL, 500mL, to 5L — and have cumulatively fulfilled over 1 lakh litres of sanitiser so far since the start of the second wave. Read more.
Startup Spotlight
This New Delhi startup provides personalised dietary and supplements recommendations
The COVID-19 pandemic has taught people one important lesson — to take care of their health. To that effect, New Delhi-based wellOwise helps people live a healthy life by realising the potential health risks and diseases.
Founded in 2018 by Dr Saher Mehdi and Manish Kumar, wellOwise is a precision health startup aimed at preventing lifestyle diseases and delivering a precision diagnosis. Read more.
News & Updates
- India's COVID-19 situation remains hugely concerning, with several states continuing to see a worrying number of cases, hospitalisations, and deaths, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, warning that the pandemic's second year will be "far more deadly" than the first for the world.
- MSN Labs (MSN) has announced that it has entered into a royalty-free, non-exclusive, and voluntary licence agreement with US-based Eli Lilly and Company to manufacture and market Baricitinib drug for COVID-19 in India.
- Bharti Airtel has announced that business of all sizes can set up a free Covid Helpline for their employees within two minutes with Airtel IQ – a cloud communication platform.
- Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has announced the launch of oxygen concentrator banks for COVID-19 patients in home isolation. He claimed that the oxygen will reach the patients in two hours.
Before you go, stay inspired with…
“We are continuing to live through the worst humanitarian crisis ever. And we may not be able to stop it but we can definitely alleviate the distress of many around us.”
— Ramesh Balasundaram, Co-founder, Bal Utsav
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