Beating the pandemic, one flight at a time

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It is time for ideas to take flight in preparing for the inevitable third wave of Covid-19. The challenge of supplying critical medicines and even pre-emptive vaccinations must be overcome with technology.

Flipkart’s lead in the Telengana government’s drone-based remote location vaccine delivery project — ‘Medicines from the Sky’ — is worth trying across the country. Once proven to be effective, it must be used for supply of emergency medicines and other essentials feasible for drone delivery.

Executing this at a national level, though desirable, will not be easy. It will require extensive scaling up of technology and delivery processes at a higher clip than scaling up of health infrastructure and production of medicines and vaccines.

The drone-delivery idea is not new. Amazon’s Prime Air is a drone-delivery project under works in the US. Domino’s drone delivery of pizzas was tested five years back. Many other players have toyed and even succeeded with drone delivery concepts.

The same technology and skills need to be transported to critical healthcare requirements so that supply chain disruptions and the production-to-patient time may be reduced drastically during the next wave. In the interim, the trial and testing could be done with supply of vaccines – serving the dual purpose of deliver as well as process training.

Operationalising this, though, will first require flying permit from the Civil Aviation Ministry. This is a bottleneck that drone pilots in the entertainment sector have unsuccessfully grappled with for long. The next challenge is that of landing space at hospitals — not difficult to overcome by allocating a small area on the rooftop of city hospitals or designated landing spots in districts.

To avoid accidental or purposeful delivery-related errors and disputes, a unique passcode or PIN sent from the supplier to the end user should open the storage hatch, failing which — an SOS alert gets issued.

Other exigencies like wind, weather and digital connectivity need to be worked out meticulously. A body of aviators, technologists as well as logistics professionals specifically from the pharma sector should be commissioned immediately to draw up a workable plan that gives wings to a, thus far, flight of fantasy.

Let new ideas fly for the virus challenge demands an out-of-box solution mindset.

Even if this idea doesn’t fly, it for sure opens our mind to think technology to beat the virus as it threatens to rear its head again. Let us get real and see the limitation of a neta-babu war against coronavirus.