Bengaluru: 25-year-old techie raises questions over Yediyurappa government's handling of Covid-19

Bengaluru: In July, a lady in urgent need of hospitalisation was turned down by 16 hospitals because no beds were available. However, the government claimed they had sufficient beds to treat patients. It was at the moment that Santosh Doddaiah, a 25-year-old techie made calls to the hospitals listed on the government website and found that some were maternity hospitals, dental hospitals or eye hospitals, and some did not have staff to treat the patients.

"How can maternity IVF centres can treat the Covid patients? This is the response I got from some hospitals. It was then that we (me and my friend, Mohammad Sulaiman) built the website. We came up with the website covidbeds.org on July 9, much before the BBMP came up with Covid Hospital Bed Management System (CHBMS)," Santosh said.

Initially, such hospitals that had not adequate arrangements to treat Covid positives but were listed on the website were not aware of their names being listed. Later, with the coordination of the BBMP officials their names were removed from the list.

However, in the month of July when CHBMS was open to the citizens the BBMP claimed to have more than 330 private hospitals, which he found inaccurate. "A few days later the number of the private hospitals listed on the website came down to 85 which was closer to the number of hospitals offering the treatment," he said. Santosh's observation has been that though things have changed since July but even now there are five-six private hospitals which are ill-equipped to treat Covid patients are listed on the website.

"Even in my conversations with the BBMP and the hospitals there is only blame game that is on. The CHBMS is like a Bookmyshow. Once the bed is blocked by the government for the patient, the hospital should also confirm the same. The government claims that though they block the beds the hospitals do not confirm and the hospitals say that even after their claims of not having beds the BBMP keeps sending the patients.So in patients' suffer," Santosh added.

Recently, Santosh has launched two new services called Ambulance on Whatsapp. This allows users to book an ambulance by sending their details on 7610810848, and 814729011 for bed assistance. Presently, the CHBMS site shows there are 118 private hospitals and 1,543 government quota beds in these hospitals.