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With Indian citizens turning to social media platforms and reaching out to family, friends, and doctors for COVID-related assistance, the information shared through these mediums is not always verified or structured in an easy-to-discover manner.

Looking to address this issue is covidcitizens.org, a singular platform for ver­i­fied, com­pre­hen­sive, lo­cal, citi­zen-sourced COVID-19 re­sources.

It is a citizen-driven community initiative to facilitate convenient access to current and comprehensive information and support. Its 300+ volunteers verify and crowd-source pan-India information on critical COVID resources such as medicines, oxygen cylinders, beds, blood tests, meal services, plasma, ambulances, and more.

Launched less than a week ago, it is a not-for-profit collective, is not affiliated with the government, and is free to use.

How it works?

The website is an evolv­ing and ver­i­fied data­base of beds, oxy­gen cylin­ders, plas­ma, and oth­er valu­able re­sources. Users can ei­ther search by lo­ca­tion di­rect­ly on the web­site or find in­for­ma­tion through its WhatsApp helpline and Fireside COVID helpline.

Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, Co-founder at Wakefit and one of the members responsible for driving the Covid Citizens initiative, says:

“We are building India’s largest real-time, updated database of resources. Updated leads are critical because a supplier of oxygen, while restocking his/her supply, is not a valuable resource for a certain timeframe and feels overwhelmed by the large number of incoming calls.”

He adds, “The recommendation engine driving Covid Citizens performs load balancing. This means a bot performs real-time verification of resources and shows potential leads to users only a certain number of times before they are exhausted and moved down the order.”

In the past week, Covid Citizens claims to have responded to over 3.5 lakh COVID-related medical requests and helped save over 20,000 lives through its pan-India WhatsApp bot Introbot, chat platform Fireside, and a real-time, trusted database of over 18,000 medical suppliers.

The founders claim over 5,000 users found a useful lead within the first three choices provided by the Covid Citizens service.

Utkarsh Roy, co-founder of Introbot and a proponent of Covid Citizens, says, “We are building one of the largest supply pool databases in the country and moving from community-driven aggregation to crowdsources aggregation, which can help us scale 10x.”