| Hello. I'm Saritha Rai reporting from what's now become the coronavirus epicenter of the world. India is registering staggering numbers of new infections daily. Hospital systems and crematoriums have reached a breaking point, and vaccines and critical drugs sell for exorbitant sums on the black market. For me, a mass tragedy has never been so personal. Several of my extended family members have been hospitalized. And many of my friends' close relatives didn't make it. One of the central challenges in the 1.3 billion-person country is finding supplies. Inadequate government information systems and meager health care infrastructure has given rise to a surge of do-it-yourself medical sourcing. The nexus of these efforts are social media and messaging platforms like Twitter Inc., Instagram and Facebook Inc.'s WhatsApp, which have become de facto coronavirus helplines, inundated with SOSes from people frantically seeking life-saving medicines, hospital beds, ambulances and oxygen. Almost every day, I get messages from friends and family asking for help tracking down Remdesivir and Tocilizumab doses, ICU beds, oxygen concentrators and other supplies in faraway cities and small towns. For many people facing a medical emergency in their family, the search starts with a desperate call for help to friends and strangers on social media, appealing to their networks to locate hospitals and drug stores and wholesale suppliers that have the needed item. Quickly, leads pop up—usually in the form of phone numbers for nursing homes, makeshift hospitals and chemists. Nearly always, they're dead ends. Last week, a friend reached out desperately asking for Tocilizumab for her hospitalized mother. I tried dozens of numbers. Some were out of stock, others were bogus leads and nobody even answered the remaining. Over the weekend, I was part of a group urgently seeking oxygen concentrators for a classmate's Dad, an affectionate "uncle" from our childhood years. Hundreds of calls later, supply was secured. Later in the day came the news that the 78-year-old had passed away. The search for medical supplies on social media has become so ubiquitous that even large hospital chains and foreign embassies are taking to the platforms to request medical oxygen. For a few people, social media can be a lifeline. But the tech companies have also inadvertently created a new realm of crowd-sourced chaos. One neighbor called 70 numbers from Twitter for a medicine for her aunt, without finding a single one that worked. Even if the numbers had been valid, they would have been rendered useless exactly an instant after posting. Every day, families are undertaking a gut-wrenching race to source critical items for a person nearing death—an ordeal that's exhausting both mentally and physically. There have been some calls for greater accountability in posts. The WhatsApp admins in a group catering to residents of the high rise where I live, for example, asked members to personally verify leads before sharing or forwarding. But the deluge of unverified information has continued. Radha Rangarajan, chief scientific officer of diagnostics startup HealthCubed, enlisted a horde of volunteers from her Stanford University alumni group and other networks. They are sifting through the enormity of information, trying to compile lists of genuine suppliers. But the situation is "moving too fast and even an army of volunteers can't keep this up-to-date," said the Stanford and Harvard-trained infectious disease expert, whose database is not yet public. Rangarajan believes tech companies themselves should now get involved. "The scale and speed of this needs a methodical tech-originated approach," she said. Volunteer groups and well-meaning citizens have taken a shot at bringing order to the social media maelstrom, so far with zero success. But perhaps Big Tech's algorithms could come to the rescue by scrubbing bad information and surfacing verified leads. If the companies were able to find a way to speedily authenticate crowd-sourced information, that might also have myriad commercial applications. Facebook, Google and other technology giants count India as their largest user base, with half a billion users for some of their services. They're now in a position to help bring order to the country's crowd-sourced pandemonium, and for many people, there's not much time. —Saritha Rai | 
Post a Comment