New Delhi, June 29: Delhi Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal on Monday said that a 'plasma bank' will be made operational in the national capital in two days to treat COVID-19 patients.

Plasma therapy involves injecting blood-component plasma extracted from a cured coronavirus patient into a positive case for treatment.

Addressing a press conference, Kejriwal said, "Plasma bank will be made operational at the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences in the next two days. Government or private hospitals in which the patient is being treated can prescribe plasma therapy after which ILBS can be approached."

The Chief Minister also urged cured patients to come forward to donate plasma and said that they will be provided taxi service to the hospital and contact details on which they can inform the authorities about their decision to donate plasma.

"People have this misconception that they will contract coronavirus again if they step into a hospital. I want to inform them that the possibility of contracting the virus again is low and ILBS is not a COVID hospital," he emphasised.

Cloud To Fight COVID-19

On the other side, IT modernisation and digital transformation via Cloud-driven solutions in the public sector and various state governments are fast embracing the Cloud technology to reduce the infection rate while efficiently managing the lockdown, a top global Amazon Web Services (AWS) executive has stressed.

According to Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector, AWS, “Research institutes, scientists and organisations working on diagnostics need reliable, scalable compute power, which AWS can deliver to them along with industry-leading services so they can process and analyse large data sets and iterate quickly."

Quantela, a provider of smart urban infrastructure automation, has developed CoVER (COVID-19 emergency response) platform in India. “It is used by government authorities across 10 cities in India to monitor, manage, track, diagnose, communicate, collaborate and prevent the impact of COVID-19," informed Carlson.

The India eGovernments Foundation collaborated with AWS to develop the National COVID-19 e-Pass solution within 72 hours to provide a digital pass management system that supports multiple state governments, to manage the lockdown while ensuring smooth movement of the essential service providers across and within states.

TruFactor is a platform that provides mobile-first consumer data and insights. The company has a patented platform that ingests, filters, and processes over 100TB of data anonymously, using AI to produce graphs that combine digital signals, physical people movement data, and demographics to help tackle spread of COVID-19.

Innovaccer, a San Francisco-based healthcare technology company, with offices in India and Asia, launched a COVID-19 Management System that can conduct early community-based triage of COVID-19 patients through automated assessments in minutes.

Mumbai-based Qure.ai, a healthcare startup built on AWS, has developed a machine learning-powered solution called 'qXR', which uses X-rays to classify patients as high, medium, or low risk for COVID-19 in less than a minute.

AWS announced the Diagnostic Development Initiative (DDI) in March this year, with an annual investment of $20 million, to support customers bring accurate diagnostics solutions and promote better collaborations across organisations.

"We are actively working with 35 projects that have been submitted and are still accepting more applications," said Carlson.