CovRelief, an app to Help COVID-19 Patients Find Resources

IIT Delhi alumni –  Milan Roy, Pranit Ganvir (BTech 2018) and Swapnil Sharma (BTech 2019) – launched an app to help the families of COVID-19 patients with verified leads on various resources. 

The CovRelief app is a simple interface that offers a lot of important information. It tracks in real-time the availability of hospital beds, lists oxygen suppliers, shares videos from doctors and list of people or outlets that prepare meals for COVID-19 patients isolating at home and has an updated list of state helpline numbers. It also has a ‘city stress meter’ that provides an indication of how stressed a city’s healthcare infrastructure is.

All the information is collected from two sources and updated by the hour. The sources are, one, official government websites, and two, a pair of crowdsourced networks that provide authenticated real-time information: CoronaSafe Network and Covid Fight Club. The data pertains to over 32 cities, including Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Dehradun and Jaipur, and its makers are working to add more.

Since coming online on April 23, the non-profit app was accessed 23.4 million times within the first 2 weeks and has helped patients and caregivers navigate the tribulations of COVID-19. “In the initial days, we had such a huge response from the public that we added a feedback button to the app,” Roy said. “Scores of people started asking us to include their own cities so we have gradually increased our [coverage]… It has been a very organic growth so far.”

The city-level information is the product of the efforts of the Covid Survivor Force, a network of over 450 volunteers who track and verify leads across cities. They joined forces with CovRelief to support the app. “One of the main challenges that we had at first was the speed with which we had to update the information, especially in cities like Delhi, where there has been a massive increase in requests for help.” Even hourly updates weren’t good enough. So the makers added a ‘need help’ button to redirect users to the Covid Survivor Force’s Facebook page, where they could directly post their requests.

The app’s rapid growth also caught the attention of tech giants Microsoft and Google. Google responded by putting together a group of 50 volunteers to help monitor real-time data and offered its Cloud Platform to host CovRelief.

Source: https://thewire.in/tech/covrelief-app-covid-19-patients