If Wave-1 was hard, wave-2 proved it to be wrong. Covid-19 pandemic wave-2 hit India later than most of western nations but it came thick and hard. The problems were totally different and what we learnt from Wave-1 helped only so much. It was a quick successive unprecedented disaster to be managed by everyone.
Total shortage of hospital beds, dire need for Oxygen cylinders for home care, acute shortage of essential drugs and related mindless hoarding, black marketeering and fake medicines were the new challenges. Something that goes largely unmentioned is the plight of dependents who have their bread winning family member hospitalized or deceased. Infants and children losing parent(s), the trauma and need for support for mental health was evident.
While I was helping in other teams volunteering to co-ordinate support across multiple areas, I was called for now to help in setting up something closer to my heart but not an easy one emotionally. It was to work on setting up a single channel helpdesk for the public to reach out for help in managing the deceased. A much needed service for the moment again thought out in advance by the administration especially Major Manivannan IAS, given the rising number of deaths and the projection of worse to come. Data driven decision making is not impossible in Government provided we have the right spirited people with the commitment and intent to help the public.
To give some context , until this attempt, the different burial/cremation grounds and electric crematoriums of various faiths around the city operated independently. It took a good amount of paper work from the family, hospital and logistics from Government to manage each death. The spurt in the need and anticipated scale would have wrecked havoc in the logistics system, be it fuel, transport or manpower needed. Needless to mention, tensions will run high with the families dealing with chaos for a deceased loved one. Our larger team worked night and day on the ground, in hospital mortuaries, burial and cremation grounds ensuring the families have minimal friction in the entire process. Remember, these are the days when families were losing every coin in their pocket to either pay for hospital beds, oxygen, inflated medicines when the lives of sole bread winners were at stake. It was not uncommon to see families leaving behind dead ones in hospital. Sadly understandable, they wanted to save the very little left over money to feed living people than deal with a dead one. This is just one of the heartening scenarios we faced.
There was a physical team setup with a multi line 24/7 call handling capability who can co-ordinate across ambulance, hospital and burial/cremation grounds. My team worked together in taking care of all the help requests coming through social media. It involved creation and management of SM handles dedicated for this service, data gathering, 24/7 shift management to co-ordinate help and ensuring that people know of the different channels available to reach out to. We called it ‘Antima Yatre’, translates to Final Journey. As stated earlier, the purpose we set out was to make sure that the family of the deceased gets every support needed to give an honorable final rite for their loved ones in the pandemic.
It was a humbling and pleasant surprise moment when our team was invited one fine day in the last week of 2021 to be appreciated by the Govt of Karnataka (state). Received the appreciation on behalf of many who deserved it a lot more. The icing on the cake to me was to receive the certificate from the man himself, Major Manivannan IAS and spend the evening discussing multiple topics, including what next will create the most positive impact to larger public …
My Wave-1 experience: My Covid-19 journey