COVID Warzone

Back in high school, over summer break, when Covid had just massively hit India, my best friend and I noticed how badly the infrastructure was failing. Hospitals could not handle the influx of patients. Oxygen cylinders were running out for elderly patients. People stuck at home because of the lockdowns could not leave to get food, and even food delivery systems and restaurants were struggling to reach them.

What made it worse was how scattered everything was. If you wanted a hospital bed, you had to sit there calling 20 to 30 different hospitals yourself and hope somebody picked up. There was no single place to see what was available, how long the wait was, or who could actually help right now.

So we built COVID Warzone. We started off at a small scale, then ended up showing live details from tens of hospitals, compiling bed availability into one database so people could get live details and wait times immediately, and helping people get support faster through the site. We also organised oxygen cylinder delivery for elderly patients through the website and helped hundreds of people get teleconsultation support online through our portal.

Over time, we partnered with more than 12 restaurants to provide free food to Covid-positive patients and vulnerable families, worked with eka.care to launch a free teleconsultation programme, connected with doctors in Delhi through social media, and coordinated with local police for critical supply delivery. Our social media campaigns reached more than 100,000 people with accurate health information and updates about our region.

This was my first real taste of entrepreneurship. Not the startup kind, but the kind where you're a teenager on the phone with hospital administrators and restaurant owners trying to get them to share data they've never shared before. Nothing was organized. Hospitals tracked beds on paper. Restaurants had no system for bulk orders. Doctors were overwhelmed and unreachable through normal channels.

What I learned is that the hardest part was never the code (even more true in the AI age, now that I think about it). It was convincing disconnected people and institutions to work together, and then building the software to make that coordination feel effortless.

That experience shaped how I think about building things.