Dr Saurabh Kumar, 25, a former resident doctor and student at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Patna takes around 60 to 70 distress covid related calls daily, most of which are from rural areas of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
His experience of more than thirteen months of attending Covid-19 patients in the Intensive Care wards of AIIMS, Patna helps him to consult better. In this pursuit, he is joined by eleven more young doctors from premier medical institutions who also take around the same number of calls and queries.
An initiative of Kumar Shanu, an advocate and a graduate from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in the United States has become the go-to helpline for all sorts of Covid related help. He says, “In the initial days, we were responding and taking up SOS calls from Twitter and helping people out there but with the wave intensifying and shifting towards rural India, social media platforms have become of little use.”
In the initial days of the second wave, a team of students from institutions like Delhi University, IIT and National Law Universities worked day and night to verify leads and channel SOS requests.
With time, the numbers of requests decreased on Twitter and lead available started to get unresponsive. Rohit, one of the members verifying leads said “With time, the leads started to run dry, most of them switched off their numbers in a few days and the initial system on Twitter started to break down”.