Inspiration
When Varshini's aged grandparents, who live alone, saw themselves grappling with a sudden 21-day lockdown in India, she frantically searched Facebook for any local groups that could help them with supplies and food. When she didn't find any, she realized that an infrastructure which was designed to help a community at a local level was missing and this inspired the design proposed by our team.
Our team then looked for Facebook pages or groups in other areas that were catering to this need, in order to gauge the need for such pages, if any. We came across a group created by a resident of the Fayette area (USA) on March 16th, called 'Fayette Area Coronavirus Assistance Needs / Availability', which as of 29th March has 4100 members. Thus, with sufficient indication of such a provision being the need of the hour (currently missing in almost all locations), we propose our solution as a proof of concept.
What it does
Leveraging Facebook's massive global reach, we propose a new tab (like Marketplace) called 'COVID-19 Community'. This community will have the underlying principle used by Uber and other location based apps. Based on your location, Facebook will classify you into a COVID-19 Community with a fixed radius. For example, if we have someone living in Brooklyn, New York, their COVID-19 Community would be comprised of everyone living in Brooklyn who uses Facebook.
Each location will have its own Community and one can report their daily status on this community. For example, if Sarah lives in Brooklyn, New York and is part of the COVID-19 Community for Brooklyn, she can report herself as 'Healthy', 'Infected' or 'Recovering' and everybody on the community can view her present status. This would help people estimate how many people in their community are infected and in isolation.
Members of a COVID-19 Community should be able to communicate with each other by posting requests and questions on their Community. If an elderly citizen is struggling with supplies or medicines, they can post their requirements on the Community and volunteers from the same Community can offer to pick up their items and deliver it to them.
If a Community is too large, volunteers moving in large numbers will be undesirable. Delivery staff and drivers from companies like Uber, Ola, Flipkart, Swiggy and Zomato who are currently unemployed, can each be assigned a local Community and their job would be to cater to all the delivery needs that anybody in the Community has.
Several young students with no access to meals are often stranded. We propose an employment option for people within a Community with cooking skills, who are willing to cook and pack meals for such students. The delivery staff for the Community will pick up these packed meals and drop them at the student's location.
A pandemic can cause infected people to feel ostracized and lonely. Each COVID-19 Community will have a chatroom (similar to Reddit) where people can chat online with other infected members of the Community or simply offer support and comfort to those who feel isolated.
A drawback in the current testing system at most places is that a symptomatic person has to physically go to the hospital and get tested. Drive-through testing is not operational in countries like India which are under complete lockdown. This potentially infected individual is putting valuable resources like doctors, nurses, hospital staff at immense risk not to mention vulnerable patients, because hospitals are one of the most crowded areas at present. The exponential rate of growth primarily feeds on instances like these and in order to counter this current practice, we propose a 'doorstep testing' solution. Each COVID-19 Community will be associated with all the nearest hospitals and anybody who wishes to get tested, simply drops a request on the Community.
For example, if Sarah feels symptomatic, she reports herself as symptomatic on her Brooklyn COVID-19 Community and requests for a doorstep test. Let's say there are 3 nearby Brooklyn hospitals. The hospital that responds first will connect Sarah to a doctor over the phone and depending on the doctor's recommendation, Sarah will require a test. In that case, the hospital assigns a staff who will perform Sarah's test. The Community's Uber driver will perform a round trip by picking up and dropping the staff back at the hospital. The test will be performed at Sarah's residence and results will be uploaded online.
How we built it
We offer this solution as a Proof of Concept due to the lack of time to build and deploy such a large scale application. Also, Facebook has the perfect global reach that is required in this case, thus giving us the intuition behind adding this feature to it.
Challenges we ran into
Due to the lack of time, we were unable to build an app demonstrating our idea and since Facebook already has an established worldwide reach, we proposed an addition to the app. However, if this solution has the potential to be deployed, we would be thrilled to develop a working prototype that can be tested on the field.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We managed to kill many birds with one stone by proposing a number of solutions. This includes providing employment options for daily wage workers from Uber, Ola, Uber Eats, Swiggy and Zomato, providing the option to work from home for those with cooking skills, providing the elderly with food delivery options, helping students who are struggling with daily food, helping those who are grappling with social distancing and also introducing a novel technique of doorstep testing. If any of these are implemented even at a local level, we are confident of creating a tangible difference in terms of helping those in need and also potentially flatten the curve to an extent.
What we learned
We performed research on what worked and didn't work for each country and what stood out was China's technique of aggressive testing that helped flatten the curve. While China's techniques are specific to an authoritarian government and may not be amenable to democracies, we are confident that our solution is a step in the right direction, by allowing communities to have its members' backs. Doorstep testing can go a long way in countries that are testing the traditional way. Korea used a GPS based technique to track all its citizens which we incorporate by asking members to report themselves daily on the app as 'Infected', 'Healthy' or 'Recovering'. Each community tracks its own members which brings about an overall global impact.
What's next for Facebook COVID-19 Community
We can begin working on a prototype that can actually be deployed and tested on the field.
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