The Plasma Chaos — and a solution
Yesterday, after the frantic call from a friend whose father needed B+ plasma from a COVID recovered patient, I came face to face to the reality of plasma shortage and blind chaos all around.
Being a part of multiple WhatsApp groups, I already had multiple forwarded messages mentioning a load of contacts to call and links to register. Along with a teammate, we relentlessly started calling one number after another, only to find that majority of them were non-existent and/or switched off. I tried a few NGO’s contacts which were switched off too.
Posted on multiple FB groups, Instagram handles, tweeted to multiple handles, messaged many Blood Banks on Whatsapp number, but it was all wait-n-watch.
We filled up a few long forms to request plasma and had no option but to wait.
Thanks to many friends who responded back, connecting me to probable donors. Although, It didn’t really work out.
It was utter data chaos as everyone was posting everything almost everywhere!
After this gloomy experience, I ended up thinking, isn’t there any way to target specifically a particular blood group recently recovered COVID- person?
My engineering mind got into action. Yes, we can simplify this to an extent! Let's see how:
- We give the Aadhar number when we get the RT-PCR test done.
2. So, all test reports are linked to the Aadhar number.
3. Aadhar number has all the information about a person like age, mobile number, email and residential address.
So, Government has already all the data it needs to reach out to specific people. Obviously, that data can’t be shared with everyone due to privacy issues.
But, it can be used by the government itself to request specific people directly, make them aware of what they can do to save the life of other people.
It can just be a very targeted reach out to specific people rather than hitting in the dark.
Can’t Aarogya Setu show that “10 people in my 5 km radius need B+ Plasma”?
A more optimistic thought would be to have a centralised system where it can map relatives, neighbours (based on Pincode), etc.
The donation can be made more of a personalised initiative.
Going forward, we can link such acts of donation to a “Good Karma Currency” redeemable against government fines like Minor Traffic Violations etc. which would give people an extra push to come forward and donate.
As you read this, we have more than 25,000 cases in the last 24 hours with a positivity rate of 30% and less than 100 ICU beds vacant in the entire Delhi.
I hope some structure is brought to this calm this chaos, Soon.
