It has been a long and tough month for India. Today, the country reported 4.12 lakh fresh cases and 3,980 official deaths - making this India's worst COVID19 toll since the pandemic began in January 2020. Hospitals are massively overrun, understaffed and crucial supplies like oxygen concentrators, drugs and even ICU beds are running dangerously low. After announcing its vaccine rollout in January, senior citizens, those with comorbidities and those above 45 years of age were declared eligible for getting the vaccines. While the uptake of vaccination started out with vigour, it was moving along slower than expected. As of a week ago, 150 million shots have been administered - that's roughly 11.5% of the Indian population of 1.3 billion. However, this doesn't mean the 11.5% is fully inoculated - many are still waiting for their second shot to be administered. 

When COVID19 cases began to surge unexpectedly from April 2021, it not only disrupted the healthcare infrastructure but also abruptly stalled the pace of vaccinations. In addition, the announcement declaring those above 18 years eligible to get vaccines from May 1 has added to the ongoing confusion regarding vaccine availability. Most healthcare centres are intent on those above 45 years of age complete their inoculation process, and vaccines are still not available in the numbers needed to cover those in the 18-45 years age bracket. 

In short, we have a short supply of vaccines and a larger section of the population declared eligible to get the jab. 

When the vaccine rollout was initially announced, the government asked Indian citizens to sign up on the CoWin site or app to register themselves. When the government announced on April 28, 2021 that the portal would be open from May 1 to those between the ages of 18-45 sign up, thousands of citizens have been thronging the CoWin app to procure slots. It's become a game of fastest finger first, quite literally. Slots for even those above 45 are now difficult to get, and in many cities, there are no slots for the 18-45 age category. 

Some techies are stepping up their efforts to assist in vaccine availability notification. With APIs on the CoWin site made open for public use, several tech companies and independent coders have developed sites or apps that can provide users an email notification when a vaccine is made available at a centre near you. Some of these sites are GetJab.in, FindSlot.in, Under45.in and VaccinateMe.in. Facebook's Vaccine Finder Tool, which has been in use in other countries, has rolled out a version for India after partnering with the Indian government. The Indian version will be available in 17 languages, and will indicate vaccine centre locations and their hours of operation. This information has been provided by the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. Earlier this morning, Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma announced on his Twitter handle that Paytm has launched a new tool to notify users via Paytm chat of vaccine availability. Some programmers have posted scripts on GitHub to help people book slots as well.

For those techies working on these solutions, its a part they're playing in helping the nation fight the ongoing pandemic, whose second wave is taking a heavy toll on the country's stretched healthcare system. Even though its early development and scaling days, there is a significant role that AI can play in ironing out the process loopholes. GetJab.in was set up by ISB alumnus and Freshworks product manager Shyam Sunder in less than a day with three other colleagues. So far, the site has 30,000 registrations from 350 out of 750 districts in India. While their platform is able mine the data available on the CoWin app, the email delivery is taking time and the team is currently working on resolving the same. The site is hosted on cloud collaboration service platform Airtable that can hold up to 50,000 records but eventually, would have move to AWS or Azure as sign ups increase. Though vaccine availability is low now, this kind of solution would be extremely useful when the product becomes widely available. "We are still in early stages and are more interested in delivering information about vaccine availability in a compact manner. Right now, there are no systems in place to aggregate vaccine information and disperse it, and we're hoping this gets resolved soon. What we foresee as challenges or use cases is type of vaccine available and predicting slot availability after analysing data points from vaccine centres. This obviously requires more data to build robust ML models, but can be very convenient to plan getting the first and even second dose accordingly," says Sunder. 

Fintech startup Signzy too has developed an app that notifies people of vaccine availability in a pincode of their preference. Cofounder Arpit Ratan and CTO Ankur Pandey say this is their contribution to India's ongoing 'wartime' effort against COVID19. Using data from the CoWin app, the developers have built a bot, leveraging Robotic Process Automation. Based on the age provided, the bot filters out the locations serving vaccines and the pincode provided allows the bot to identify nearby pincodes as well. This app has about 11,000 unique users since its weekend launch and a total of 16,000 registrations already. Pandey says, "Vaccines are definitely scarce in cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore but are available in abundance in Andaman & Nicobar Islands. Over a period of time, AI will be a crucial component of these platforms to identify users who need their consequent doses, predict vaccine availability at centres and provide vaccine alternatives as more brands make their way into the market. This will allow people to plan their days and weeks better, and avoid crowding at these vaccine centres."

Ratan adds that the code and platform is open source, so its open to other developers to build on top of the existing architecture and improve the user experience.

Ultimately, when vaccines are available in abundance, the scope of this project would be much wider, requiring more capital, resources and architecture to scale. When this happens, technologies like AI can be used for a variety of use cases that make vaccine rollout more effective and organised.