Kanupriya Mal Set Up A Website To Help Find Plasma Donors For Covid-19 Patients After Her Parents Tested Positive. This Is Inspiring
With over 6 lakh coronavirus cases and counting, the medical situation in the country is pretty bad. It’s particularly worse in the bigger cities like Delhi and Mumbai where there aren’t enough beds to admit Covid patients, let alone treat them. If this wasn’t enough, the serious dearth of plasma donors has posed an even bigger challenge.
A Delhi resident Kanupriya Mal went through the same struggle when she found out that both her parents had tested positive for Covid-19. Her father needed a suitable plasma donor which was not easy. She did eventually find a donor but the whole experience inspired her and her husband, Adwitiya Mal along with a childhood friend of Adwitya, Mukul Pahwa, to launch a platform to help find and match Covid patients with the plasma donors. The website called Dhoondh.com was formed in four days with an investment of 2.27 lakhs and went live on 11 June.
Pahwa worked on coding day and night to get the website live in such little time. The website gained over 12,000 hits within 3 days and 1,100 people registered including donors and patients. As of 15 June, 150 Covid-19 patients and 190 plasma donors have registered on the website.
“We have seen extremes of human nature in this process—a donor who volunteered to donate plasma who, despite not being well-off, spent his own money to get a blood test, pay for transport and so on and yet refused to take any money from us. The other extreme was people saying ‘paise aap transfer kar do, hum kal aayenge (transfer the money and we will come tomorrow). And I couldn’t really blame them, everybody’s hard up these days,” Adwitiya Mal, told Livemint.
This website makes the process incredibly fast and smooth. The donors and patients have to fill in their details through a form which records their blood group, location and contact. The algorithm them matches the patient with a suitable donor and the contact details of donor is then shared with the patient. Because plasma therapy is an experimental treatment for Covid, the patient needs to provide a case sheet from a doctor on duty before he is matched with a donor.
Also Read: Kanika Kapoor Volunteers To Donate Her Plasma For The Treatment Of Other Patients With Covid-19. We Think It Is A Great Gesture.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CCA4K8AAN5-/
Kanupriya, with her two partners, is working towards the getting more and more people to register and help in these tough times. After experiencing the struggle of finding a potential donor for her father, she took it upon herself to make things easier and better for everyone else. We really hope that people come forward to donate and make this initiative an even bigger success. Isn’t this the best Coronavirus news you’ve heard all year?
