Please consider reaching out to your elderly neighbors and offering your time to gather groceries/supplies for them. Or posting a note near the entrance of your apartment complex with your number. This alone will have a huge impact. They have a very real chance of dying if they contract covid-19. Take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you could not safely leave your home.<p><rant>
A lot of us have the amazing comfort of working from our own homes, isolated from the rest of the world. In roughly 2-3 weeks, the epicenter locations of this disease in the US are going to run out of hospital beds. If you are younger and healthy, please consider asking your boss if you need to be working full time right now. Watch your state governor's and mayor's press conferences. They will communicate to you where you can go to help volunteer.<p>We are going to transition to "war time leadership". A time that will test everyone's true character.
</rant>
This is a great initiative, but it looks to me like most of these projects are directed to help the US. That's totally understandable, but there are many people all over the world willing to help with this, and it would be great if we could also collaborate to help everyone.<p>For example, as an engineer, I was interested in helping with the 1M ventilators project, but reading the description it looks like the goal is to create a reserve for the US of more than 740000 ventilators. Sorry, but I want to help people everywhere, not just in the US. The whole world needs ventilators.<p>Maybe I just misunderstood, and the US numbers were just indicative, but it does not look like a global effort. Does anybody knows of a similar initiative that is not so focused on the US?
Here at <a href="https://www.coronawiki.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.coronawiki.org</a> we are also looking for help. I am Dr. Riciu Andrei, board certified dermatologist with a strong interest in infectious diseases<p>I put together a team of medical professionals, researchers, programmers and data scientists and we're trying to create the most accurate Coronavirus / COVID-19 resource (data stats and accurate medical information). With this project I am trying to help as many people as I can gain access to reliable information and data and stop the fake news that trigger a lot of panic.
This site, list, and general orientation of 'tech for good' applied towards CV19 is very likeable. Especially so at a time where there is going to be excess brain capacity on the sidelines due to layoffs or those now working from home who have spare time & motive to do something and feeling helpless.<p>The economic + remote labor shifts definitely open up more resources for side/volunteer stuff for those, like me, wanting to help this cause but not sure how or where to begin.<p>After reading through and clicking on a few projects of personal interest, my feedback for those listing who seek to increase their chances of success and maximize impact would be:<p>(a) make the 'how to get in touch' more consistent/accessible. An email contact should be standard. Just give me an email address and i'll give you mine, we'll go from there.<p>(b) consider thinking bigger and broader in terms of 'looking for'. It takes much more than devs/languages to get something real off the ground, scale it, and actually solve a real world problem. Designers, PMs, marketing, strategy, people with capital and connections... Not that it's fast or easy to find these things, but understanding the scope of what you will actually need to succeed upfront will only expand your funnel and give you options to evolve and grow by tapping into diverse expertise as the product is built.
I applaud the intent, but this looks like a laundry list of random ideas. There's no leadership or vetting or job descriptions. I'd love to help us build 1,000,000 ventilators, but I think the answer to that one is for governments to allocate money to manufacturers (which is starting to happen), not to crank out some javascript.
I have an idea to increase viral RNA test throughput (PCR) by 46.5 times using a binary encoding scheme that I hope someone here might be able to validate/invalidate. Sorry for the thread jack, but I tried posting this yesterday but didn't get picked up.<p><a href="https://wet-robots.ghost.io/how-to-increase-covid-19-testing-by/" rel="nofollow">https://wet-robots.ghost.io/how-to-increase-covid-19-testing...</a>
If you're on GitHub and want to help, you can edit these country-specific pages to add your area nonprofits, organizations, volunteer opportunities, and the like:<p><a href="https://github.com/nonprofitnetworks/covid" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nonprofitnetworks/covid</a><p>We're launching today with blank pages ready to edit for all countries, and we welcome help. My email is joel@nonprofitnetworks.org if you want to contact me about this.
Do these projects have PMs etc.? I am curious about them (and work at a company whose services overlap with some of these initiatives) but it's hard to tell if there's anything more just a title + a paragraph to these projects. Nothing wrong with that, just looking for some clarity here.<p>Limiting this list to projects that are <i>underway</i> and have some clear leadership might help avoid the "random list of ideas" problem that another user here pointed out. I mean to say, if you don't have a plan, a leadership group/person, and something underway, don't post (if you're not able to get that much together, you don't have a project, you have an idea, and ideas are not very valuable).
There's also <a href="https://en.coronahelpers.nl" rel="nofollow">https://en.coronahelpers.nl</a> but I think it's only for Netherlands.<p>Although I misunderstood. Above site is for finding volunteers to help with daily tasks.
I realize this is probably a work in progress, but as a suggestion, it would really benefit from better navigation:<p>- Sorting (particularly by # of volunteers, to find ones that aren't filled up)<p>- Searching by string<p>- Maybe tags that can be searched by? (skillsets wanted, etc.)<p>- Projects could list an estimated number of needed volunteers; "Does 86 mean they don't need any more?"<p>Overall, excellent idea and it looks great so far. I just think the above would make it much easier for people to find the right place to contribute.
The Helpful Engineering project has several thousand volunteers and a global scope: <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cM87eJdXhP_8e9gJJZ_SnZXdo_huWsBmMzcqYWbhEOg/preview" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cM87eJdXhP_8e9gJJZ_SnZXd...</a>
In this thread, there is an ongoing hackathon <a href="https://www.hackcrisis.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hackcrisis.com/</a> (until this weekend).
To all German speakers: There will be a government-sponsored hackathon from Friday to Sunday, please think about participating!<p><a href="https://wirvsvirushackathon.org/" rel="nofollow">https://wirvsvirushackathon.org/</a><p>We think about building tools for anonymous health data collection or a tool to fight misinformation / fake news using passive DNS data and some (simple) machine learning. Help is greatly appreciated :)
The US spends so much money on defense and making sure soldiers are prepared for war.<p>Right now, our soldiers in this war are our frontline medical staff. Nurses and doctors putting their lives on the line to help the ones in need.<p>But instead we have this :<p>Hospital Workers Make Masks From Office Supplies Amid U.S. Shortage (<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/hospital-makes-face-masks-covid-19-shields-from-office-supplies" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/hospital-...</a>)<p>Doctors in New York treating coronavirus patients reusing masks (<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/doctors-new-york-treating-coronavirus-patients-reuse-n95-masks-2020-3" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/doctors-new-york-treating-co...</a>)
Is the purpose of this site to connect me with a project needing help as fast as possible, or to collect data?<p>If the former, why do I need to sign up to join the project? Just link to whatever wiki/github/slack/trello/whatever it's using or a point of contact.
Also a very worthwhile Github Project here for the John Hopkins Map. 400+ issues at the moment<p><a href="https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/issues" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/issues</a>
If anyone is interested, I made a subreddit to discuss over-the-counter drugs, supplements, and other treatments for Covid—19:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/covid19stack" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/covid19stack</a>
You can also donate blood, "American Red Cross faces 'severe blood shortage' as cancellations increase due to coronavirus": <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/american-red-cross-faces-severe-blood-shortage-cancelations/story?id=69642130" rel="nofollow">https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/american-red-cross-faces-sev...</a><p>You can still donate while on most medications, which is something I didn't know.
Given some people need to continue working, giving care, maintaining infrastructure, maybe social distancing in time as well as physical distance would be a good idea? You might be surprised how few people are around at 4am. Even if people didn't want to work at night, they could still spread out work hours during the day. Businesses have probably already thought of this, but workers in other areas may not have.
Hopefully some of these aren't re-inventing the wheel. For instance, currently the first one is helping build APIs for getting healthcare data. This is potentially a solved problem; indeed, interoperability is rather a large market in the healthcare world (I speak as someone who does this for a living).
The thing that worries me the most about the Elderly Grocery projects is that elderly individuals are EXTREMELY vulnerable to criminals and scam artists. They are explicitly target. I'm very afraid of people volunteering for these things as a confidence builder they can use to prey upon them.
I posted this to my agency's Slack channel. It didn't unfurl because there's no OG data.<p>I added this as byline: "Community projects looking for volunteers. Sign up and add your project to the list."<p>OG data would help promote the page with less effort by those who share in social media and text messages.
> Help With COVID is a marketplace for people (especially software engineers) to find projects to contribute to, and for projects to find help.<p>Do you know how "software engineers" can "help with COVID?" By getting into their cars and bringing supplies to elderly people in their neighborhood.
We've started FeedADoc.com and posted it on helpwithcovid (<a href="https://helpwithcovid.com/projects/53" rel="nofollow">https://helpwithcovid.com/projects/53</a>). 10 volunteers from HN folks so far, thank you!
I created overnight <a href="https://covid-info.us" rel="nofollow">https://covid-info.us</a><p>I’m just trying to help out any way I can.<p>Some of the info here I will post on the site.<p>I also have access to other information which may not yet be public and that’s going up as soon as possible.
Have you seen <a href="https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/volunteering" rel="nofollow">https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/volunteering</a> ?
I built this project to help track covid trends in countries and states.
<a href="https://covidtrend.com" rel="nofollow">https://covidtrend.com</a>
My colleague launched a podcast on coronavirus news <a href="https://coronavirus.fm/" rel="nofollow">https://coronavirus.fm/</a>
maybe also this?<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/fkeewi/how_to_use_one_ventilator_to_save_multiple_lives" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/fkeewi/how_to_us...</a>
This should have started months ago when it hit China to help them.<p>So try to be forward thinking. Don't just think in the now.<p>In Italy some places don't treat people without families for instance (The excuse is they have no one to care for them after ICU, but we know the real reason)<p>Tinder for fake family's for instance?