BSS :
Common people of the upazila like elsewhere in the country are also being benefited in their fight against the COVID-19 pandemic through surfing the government sponsored web-portal ‘corona info’.
“This web portal is very helpful. We had taken medical advices and follow health rules by help of the site while I along with my husband and two sons got positive to corona virus,” said Helen Keller, a teacher of Savar Manikandan primary school.
The government’s Digital Bangladesh flagship programme, ‘A2I’ with the support of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare Affairs is running the ‘corona info’ web portal – www.corona.gov.bd – offering as kind of a one stop digital health services related to the pandemic to masses.
The portal has already given a big boost to mass awareness by making common people knowledgeable about the pandemic through providing different information related to novel coronavirus including its symptom and treatment.
The site ‘corona info’ offers all updated data and information related to pandemic as well as provides telemedicine to COVID-19 positive patients.
Halen said the telemedicine service and tutorials over different corona related mobile app, provided by the portal, are very helpful for everyone.
“When I was isolated with my family members at home, the telemedical service of the site was seemed as kind of life saver to us,” she said, adding that anyone can also get information regarding coronavirus and the pandemic situation through live chat using the ‘chatbot’ of the site.
The portal also provides information regarding coronavirus testing and hospital facilities including availability of ICU beds along with the government pandemic instructions and district wary maps pointing the hot zones of the virus.
“Recently, I got cough and mild fever. I just went through the portal for checking the coronavirus symptoms.
After seeing that my symptoms matched with the information provided by the site, I underwent the test and result was positive,” said Sayem Mollah, a respected senior citizen of the upazila.
Mollah thanked the government initiative to run the site as it helped him to detect the disease in first place that expedited his recovery from the deadly virus.
Corona info portal contains more than 5200 contents along with hotline, health info, helpline of IUCR and all information of national call centre.
Information related to coronavirus vaccination services, registration procedure, app downloads option as well as health advice on post-vaccine complications are also made available at the portal.
Oxygen assistance and ambulance services have also been added to the site for emergency assistance which helps common people a lot in critical time.
Digital Services Assessment Consultant Sajjad Hossain said that the Corona Portal was launched to bring all the information related to medical services including to the doorsteps of the people from the very beginning.
“The main goal of the portal is to prevent and control the spread of COVID-19 in Bangladesh in order to reduce its impact on the health, wellbeing and economy of the country, as well as to set out the framework to treat the infected people,” he said.
Hossian thanked Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina for lunching the Digital Bangladesh campaign that has facilitated the entire health sector including national, sub-national and grassroots community health workforce, digitally connected to robust national databases.
This portal also displays the data from the laboratory, number of people in quarantine and isolation as well the number of health facilities where COVID-19 patients can be managed. It also provides an overview of the availability of the stock of the health facilities.
Audience-specific messages are designed and disseminated through different tools at the site to amplify and widen the reach to as many as possible mass people.
On an average, 40000 people have been visiting the site daily and so far 11,26,341 people have received health services from this portal.
A total of 4,14,621 patients have been assessed for corona virus and 3,07,848 have taken follow up services from the site while 332,944 people have taken health care directly through using the hotline.
Public health experts said the control of COVID-19 will be difficult here without public participation as Bangladesh is a densely populated country with limited healthcare resources.
Therefore, they said, it is necessary to have data on public knowledge and preventive behaviors regarding COVID-19 to reduce the government’s burden in combating the spread of novel corona virus.
