When in crisis we humans make the best of the resources available to us. This disruption was dealt with immediate adaptation to the scenarios by Nodal agencies such as Smart Cities having Technical infrastructure to monitor and manage this kind of pandemic.

The government faces the humongous task of containing, monitoring and assisting its citizens from the deadly COVID-19 pandemic virus.

It has put to task its best available information on a real-time basis for everyone in the system to scale up their services, the factors affecting or contributing to it.

Within a matter of few days, smart cities switched the functions of their command centres into COVID-19 war rooms to

1. Monitor quarantine facilities.
2. Monitoring the roads and traffic through drones and pushing awareness messages through the helplines.
3. Provide free WiFi facilities and support to quarantined people.
4. Track health of suspected patients and their contacts under home quarantine.

45 smart cities have overnight transformed their hi-tech command and control centres to COVID-19 war rooms which fall under the under Smart City Mission.

These command centres have been planned more like hi-tech control rooms to see the functions of municipalities at the click of a button on several screens, all that was required was minor tweaking to diversify them for monitoring as SARS-CoV-2 hit India.

According to sources, the ministry of housing and urban affairs, the nodal ministry for 100 smart cities, has compiled a list of best practices. The innovative ideas to fight COVID-19 and develop tracking systems to ensure all suspected patients and contact lists are covered would now be shared with urban development secretaries of all states.

The cities can easily borrow ideas and fight the pandemic with better monitoring.

Apart from this, all 100 cities have put forth their best ideas.

Some cities are doing this :

1. Bengaluru: converted its command and control centre within 24 hours into Coronavirus War Room. This 24×7 centre has mapped each COVID-19 positive case using GIS, tracking health care workers using GPS and drawing up a containment plan using heat mapping technologies.
2. Tirupati: groceries and other essentials are being home delivered through the command centre.
3. Ujjain: has set up a call centre that has classified the calls into five categories

• Information on COVID-19 and its symptoms.
• People informing about a likely COVID-19 patient.
• A person who is apprehensive of an infection.
• People who are quarantined/isolated and want to know about their condition.
• Any other problem-related calls, such as non-availability of essential goods.

What better use of your AV technology than to come to use for your country at the time of dire need.