At a time, when people are afraid to step out of their doorstep, a group of young Mumbaikars are running through the length and breadth of the city, to ensure not a single Covid-19 infected patient in the city, faces any inconvenience.
Amid the rising case numbers, patients are finding it difficult to procure emergency medicines like Remdesivir and Tocilizumab, plasma alongwith hospital beds, in this situation various citizen groups and NGOs across the city have set up their administrative set up to help those in distress.
One such group is - Team SOS India, a organisation that started in Mumbai and is now helping pan-India patients in their emergencies.
At present, there are more than 500 volunteers in this group spread across the country. Members of this group have a dedicated team that tracks the SOS and distress messages in various social media websites, earlier they used contact the patients and help them accordingly, however, now they get requests from people to help them from all over the country.
"Everyday we receive atleast 200-300 requests in social media, following which our volunteers get connected with them and solve their issues at their individual level," Megha Jain, co founding member of Team SOS India, told FPJ.
Jain said, alongside solving people's distress another task her team is dedicated towards doing is to verify information that are being circulated in the social media.
"Nowadays social media is overwhelming with information but not everything that we see is true, we try to verify this information at the ground level and then help the patients and their families with the information," she added.
The team also has their own website www.TeamSOSIndia.in, where people submit their requirement, following which volunteers get back to them.
Another city based citizen's group - Mumbai North Central District Forum (MNCDF) has started its own dedicated Covid-19 war room, manned by, 20 dedicated volunteers round the clock.
Members of this group said that each day they get 700-1,000 distress messages over social media websites, which is further handled by the members of their digital war rooms.
"During the pandemic people are confused and they don't really know where to go, we are working as a medium between them and the authorities," said advocate Trivankumar Karnani - founder and spokesperson - MNCDF.
"There were times when BMC was facing technical glitches in their server and asked us to reach hospital with the patients. In this situation we secure the bed and inform the war room so that they can update the same in their records," Karnani added.
