Responding to COVID-19 in India

Abstract

Hi everyone, This (slightly unusual) post is intended to serve as a quick update on work being carried out by (Give-Well incubated) Charity Science Health and (Charity-Entrepreneurship-incubated) Suvita in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background CSH has specialised for several years in sending SMS reminders for routine immunisations. Suvita has specialised for 7 months on facilitating messaging by community immunisation ambassadors. Both approaches are evidence-based; this is a central tenet of our organisations.Routine immunisation activities in India are currently paused due to the lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It will be vital to strengthen catch-up services as soon as it becomes feasible to restart them. See WHO recommendations here and UNICEF article here for more. We are closely following developments in this area.In the meantime, we believe our combined resources and skills can be put to good use in India to help spread information encouraging behaviour change designed to reduce coronavirus transmission, in much the same way we usually work to spread information encouraging behaviour change to get routine immunisations.