With Covid-19 cases escalating to increased highs, digital platforms – right from Instagram to Whatsapp – have become aids for people looking for hospital beds, medicines, and oxygen for the patients.
Digital platforms can be broadly categorized as follows:
• Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
• Knowledge platforms like StackOverflow, Quora, and Yahoo! Answers.
• Media sharing platforms like YouTube, Spotify, and Moj.
• Service-oriented platforms like Uber, Ola, Swiggy, Zomato.
• Cloud-based platforms like Zoom, Meet, and Teams.
And all these digital platforms helped in a way during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram are immersed with despairing requests by family members and friends of patients for hospital beds and medicines. These posts have been reshared to increase the scope to a larger audience.Social media posts and WhatsApp messages are flooded with lists of hospitals, information about the availability of beds, names, and phone numbers of sellers of medicines like Remdesivir, and even food delivery services for COVID patients.Various actors and social media influencers are also updating their social media accounts with details of COVID-19 resources. Some people have gone the additional mile to validate the information, which is usually crowdsourced, to help the masses.
Misinformation has been a significant hurdle for social media platforms in the past. Tech giants Google, Facebook, and Twitter have been stepping up attempts to control misinformation around COVID-19 on their platform.Facebook, for instance, is running with independent third-party fact-checking entities, incorporating many Indian languages, to recognize misinformation around COVID-19.They had also launched a Coronavirus Information Centre to present the newest news and updates from MyGov Corona Hub, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, and global health organizations.
Government responses to managing the COVID-19 pandemic may have affected the way people were able to engage in physical activity. Digital platforms are an assuring way to support physical activity levels and may have presented an alternative for people to maintain their activity while at home.Knowledge platforms like Quora, and Yahoo! Answers are helping in creating awareness about covid and clearing doubts related to covid
Media sharing platforms like YouTube, and other OTT platforms such as Amazon Prime, and Netflix are helping the people by entertaining them and also helping them to keep their mental health in the pink.Service-oriented platforms like Uber, Ola, Swiggy, Zomato also eased the situation of the pandemic by delivering the required things to the people in need.Cloud-based platforms like Zoom, Meet, and Teams highly helped the people of schools,colleges, and various organizations by helping them conduct classes, meetings, and conferences online.
Digital platforms have played a critical role in helping people during this pandemic by supporting people in various ways and will continue to be the same and more in the future.
