Hunting for a Leftover Vaccine? This Site Will Match You With a Clinic.

Accredited social health activists (ASHA) across India fight COVID-19 related misinformation on WhatsApp. ASHAs provide basic health care to people in their villages, which puts them on the frontline of treating COVID-19 patients and educating people to dispel the many myths about the virus and its treatments. ASHAs' local interactions often identify prevailing myths, which they quickly dispel in their face-to-face exchanges and by posting in the many local WhatsApp groups that have been created. The local groups have been an effective mode of educating people and helped ASHAs gain villagers’ trust.

A community effort is underway in Massachusetts to help people secure Covid-19 vaccination appointments, despite a confusing government roll-out system. The Massachusetts COVID Vaccination Help volunteer group is composed of volunteers from across the state, who are using their free time to help individuals schedule appointments. Although there are concerns about privacy, users thus far have commended the group's persistence and success in booking appointments.

Frustrated with the Covid-19 vaccination system in New York, a local software engineer created a "much-needed vaccination appointment-finding bot" that shares available times and locations on a website and Twitter. Although the website was not built "in the way that modern websites are supposed to be built," it has still been extremely popular and users have reported successfully booking appointments because of it.

West Virginia has implemented a digital platform that allows residents to sign up for notifications if leftover doses of the COVID-19 vaccine are available for use near them. Although the system is only accessible to those with internet, it has resulted in far fewer people phoning the hotline, which in turn has allowed for greater ease for those without internet access to sign up for appointments.

Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain have each "vaccinated a higher proportion of their populations than the rest of the world" due to strategies that included early approval of the vaccine, centralized and digitized health care data management, and cross-sector information campaigns. Although it's yet to be seen how these efforts will fare when the vaccine is released to the general public, they have proven to be successful for distribution to vulnerable people and communities.

The National Education Association has launched a school-focused COVID-19 case tracker in the U.S., all thank to the efforts of a Kansas theater teacher. Alisha Morris started with an excel sheet and took to online searches to start logging the number of positive cases, first around her state, and later was tracking 48 U.S. states. By the time she handed off the data to the NEA, Morris, along with various volunteers "had logged over nearly 4,300 cases at more than 1,000 schools."

Online volunteer assistance efforts in New York have played a crucial role in the dissemination of the COVID-19 vaccine, while city and state appointment systems have caused confusion or created barriers for many. Although these efforts can't address all barriers, such as lack of computer access or literacy, they have been used by thousands of people each day to find available appointment times.

Facebook collects data from people that choose to share their location with the app, and have started sharing it with various researchers who are trying to track the spread of the novel coronavirus. They share the data anonymously, so as to avoid the privacy issues they’ve faced in the past, and researchers aggregate “the signals into a picture of flows of people” to track connectivity and movement. Beyond researchers, nonprofits are also using it to help disseminate medical resources to highly affected areas.

Volunteers from tech companies collaborated with epidemiologists to create a Covid-19 tracking site that works to monitor the spread of the virus and help people know if they have been in contact with anyone who may have been infected. Although registration to the site is still short of the goal number, 10,000 people have already provided their information.

One rural hospital in Indiana vaccinated hundreds of immigrants from Central America by working with trusted community leaders and setting up a Hispanic Health Task Force. Health officials held vaccine clinics alongside trusted community members at locations that were familiar to residents, like a local Catholic church that offers Spanish-language services. The hospital and task force initially established community connections to distribute information about COVID-19, so they were able to utilize the connections to increase vaccination rates once the vaccine rolled out.