Photo: People waiting in line to get vaccinated in Ahmedabad, India, May 1, 2021. Amit Dave | Reuters, File.
As coronavirus dominoes across India, young people have devised code to more efficiently find and register for open vaccination appointments amid limited supply of the vaccine. Berty Thomas, 35, who works at an investment back south of Chennai found himself repeatedly refreshing and scrolling the page to find a vaccination slot. Realizing it would be faster to write code to do the search, he wrote basic code that filtered available slots in the city, booked his appointment and shared the code with his friends. Immediately, he was inundated with requests to write similar filters for other cities. In just under three hours, he wrote software code that finds available vaccination appointments in major cities in India. Posting a link on Twitter that same night, so many people used it that his website crashed, and he migrated to a larger server. As the pandemic has worsened in India, people have increasingly turned online to search for hospital beds, oxygen cylinders and medication. "While this has exposed the divide between those who have smartphones and the majority in the country of 1.3 billion people who do not, it has also spurred scores of software engineers and hobby programmers like Thomas to help," Thomson Reuters Foundation reports.
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