Hyderabad: At an age when most people go onto social media or binge-play video games, Adithya Chowdary, a city-based teen, has been busy helping save lives by connecting Covid-19 patients to resources for the last two months. Active on Twitter and on WhatsApp, he has connected hundreds of requests to available, verified resources for hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, medicines and more.
For Adithya, it all started when he started observing requests for hospital beds and oxygen on Twitter. “I saw many requests and started making a lot of calls to hospitals that I found on the government websites and started connecting requests to resources. Initially I felt I should be able to get at least one person a hospital bed every day but it snowballed and there have been entire nights when I stayed up handling multiple requests parallelly. I realised that in this scenario, once you start working, you can’t go back,” shares the 18-year-old.
Later, Adithya got involved with various active groups in the city and started handling more requests with the resources he got in these groups. “For most part, the leads I get on these groups are enough and I verify them before passing it on to the patient, as it is important to ensure that the person in crisis doesn’t have to make multiple calls. I even got connected to various medicine and oxygen distributors who gave me access to their vendors. I was able to help many people that way,” says Adithya, who is an MLRIT student.
One of the biggest challenges that he faced was finding medicines, and it became a challenge because of several factors. He adds, “Finding medicines has been the biggest challenge as there are many leads and there’s also buzz about black marketing and fake drugs. So I always ensured I connected the requester to an authorised source that sells the medicines at MRP.”
Source: Telangana Today