Bengaluru: A Community Oxygen Center spearheaded by the Covid India Campaign in Basavanagudi was inaugurated by South Bengaluru MP Tejasvi Surya in the presence of MLA Ravi Subramanya and BBMP officials on Wednesday May 12.
Speaking on the occasion, the MP said “I am really happy to see the different stakeholders come together on a war footing. This is the need of the hour. I would like to thank Covid India Campaign for bringing this together. I also thank the ICATT Foundation, Aviratha Bharatha, Rotary Bengaluru South Parade, Syook, Hopscotch, and SEMI for putting this together”.
Speaking on the occasion, Dr. Naga Nischal, Consultant Emergency Medicine, Head of clinical services at Cloudnine hospitals, and Society for Emergency Medicine India (Karnataka President) said, “If patients are administered oxygen early, deterioration of a patient’s condition can be avoided and thereby need of ICU admission.We would like to bridge this gap in association with the local administration by using these community oxygen centers.”
Harsha Krishna, president of Aviratha Bharatha who has been coordinating the effort between various agencies on ground said, “We are very happy to see this center start in South Bangalore. There were a number of on ground details to be coordinated in a very short time. A big thank you to our fantastic team of volunteers who worked round the clock to make this happen”.
Swadeep Pillarisetti, an IIT Madras alumnus and co-founder of Covid India Campaign (CIC) said, “The campaign has been working since the first wave but we were caught unawares by the magnitude of the second wave. Speed is of the essence, hence we quickly conceptualized this and brought together this amazing team of volunteers and organizations for the Breathe Bangaloreinitiative under the Breathe Indiacampaign. CIC plans to start another center in Koramangala on Friday and plans are afoot for centers 3, 4 and 5. A centre a day is the mantra.”
Arjun Nagarajan, Co- Founder and CEO at Syook and head of the Breathe Bengaluru initiative said, “We knew we needed to act fast and line up a lot of things from fundraise to supply chain to distribution. We raised over INR 1 Crore in a very short period of time and in parallel got things going on the ground. A big thank you to all our donors, volunteers and well wishers” .
Covid India Campaign, a pan India disaster support task force, comprises of leading critical care specialists, frontline doctors, NGOs, entrepreneurs, CXOs and social workers. CIC has setup a community oxygen center in a record time of 7 days. This organization has been working on helping society since the first wave and quickly launched the Help Bengaluru Breathe initiative to increase the supply of oxygenated beds. During the first wave, they have already enabled donations of over INR 4 Crores of essential medical supplies like N95 masks and PPE kits, via Flipkart CSR, GiveIndia, E-Spin NanoTech and others to equip 50 hospitals across 5 states while partnering with reputed NGOs like Ekam, Dr. Monika Foundation, etc. They also set up the first plasma donation banks in Bangalore and Mysorein conjunction with the state government of Karnataka and HCG hospital.
