Hyderabad, 27th May 2021: The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic has affected all walks of society. With lack of isolation centers, hospital beds and oxygen cylinders, an initiative Covid Surge Impact Alliance (CSIA) was launched by Hyderabadis, consisting of 20 stakeholders from various NGOs, Corporates and industries associations who have come together and are actively coordinating relief activities in the state of Telangana and are delivering direct and indirect aid to the people.

COVID SURGE IMPACT ALLIANCE (CSIA) powered by Surge Impact Foundation (SIF) provides three key services; an organized, easy to use Web App with real-time and verified data at www.covidhelphyd.in; an Emergency Bed Helpline which is supported by HRH Technologies 040-67419503; and, a One-to-One Personalized Patient Request Management System with 24*7 helpline No. +91 83673 74231 which is powered by Surge Impact Foundation.

CSIA began working on 21st April and within a month, it has, with the help of over 500 volunteers, processed over 4236 COVID-19 cases of which 1987 were for plasma, 1312 for hospital beds, 627 requiring medication, 532 needing oxygen and 392 cases needing other help like food delivery, doctor consultations, last rites etc. The alliance made 100+ calls daily to verify resources availability and credibility for Oxygen cylinder, concentrators, medicines etc. CSIA was able to provide support in terms of verified resources of medical needs and direct aid to nearly 1500 cases. Mr. Raj Janagam, Director of Surge Impact Foundation said, “It is heartening to see the number of hours and quality time that the volunteers have put into saving lives through our helpline. We’ve not only established a helpline that can be scaled and merged with larger public authorities, we are also happy to share that our resource bank is the largest dataset and continues to serve the backend knowledge base for many other helplines.”

The alliance has been able to do so with a proper procedure and protocol and its activities include:

●      Proper resource compilation and verification teams to curate the entire databank

o   It was able to collate a resource database with 2500+ verified resources which were shared as open source and available to the community.

●      A team to collect cases from the helpline and other offline and online sources and place them into the airtable software used to track the progress of the cases and begin the work.

●      A case handling team to connect patients with vendors and to attend to their requirements.

●      A case allocation and resource in charge team to support the case handlers to close the cases with precision and quickness

●      Supporting a few companies in setting up helplines of their own to assist their covid affected employees and families.

●      Associations with organisations like Camp Diaries to make our work available for other states and creating Wellness teams with the help of Rubaroo organisation for internal volunteer wellbeing

CSIA future plans include interventions to get ahead of COVID-19 surge via civil society lead efforts and effective and coordinated use of volunteers, corporate donors, and state machinery. The future plans include:

●      Setting up Isolation and Oxygen centers

●      Aid  Command Control Centre of the State

●      Resource Mapping and Advocacy

●      Rural and Community based interventions where possible

You can help in following ways:

●      Volunteering

●      Help raise funds for isolation and oxygen centers

●      Help with Command Control Centre of the State

●      Resource Mapping for rural areas and Advocacy through amplifying the collective voice.