SRINAGAR: As the Covid-19 surge continues non-stop, it is a hospital bed, ICU’s and Plasma’s that is the top priority in Delhi and elsewhere. This frightening situation led to the creation of a heart-warming story rooted in Kashmir.

A Kashmiri Pandit and a Kashmiri Muslims have joined hands to come up to support Covid-19 patients in Delhi-NCR.

Adnan Shah, 19, is a journalism student from Kupwara. Then there is Sanjay Raina, a food entrepreneur who runs a Kashmiri restaurant in Delhi. Since April, the duo is running a Twitter handle @PlasmaNCR that helps people to tweet their plasma requests and highlights them until the match is found.

“Every day, we receive between 250 and 300 plasma requests from Delhi-NCR, as well as cities like Agra, Meerut, Chandigarh, and even Kashmir,” Adnan told The Time of India. Since then, have been making over 100 matches a day.

“We rely only on Twitter to get requests. We are constantly creating a list of donors with our own contact base — neighbours, friends, professional contacts or social media contacts. At times, we have to personally go to pick up and drop plasma,” Sanjay told the newspaper.

As per the handle when you scroll down the handle, you’ll see request after request for plasma in a standard format that includes the patient’s name, age, blood type, contact information, and exact location.

The duo’s journey started when Covid cases began to rise in April. The two banded together to help a common Kashmiri friend find a hospital bed.

“But then we saw the scale of the disaster and put our heads together to think how we could help, “ Shah was quoted saying. “There were a lot of requests for ICU beds, cylinders etc and plasma requests were getting lost in the larger clamour. So, we decided to focus on helping out with one thing — plasma.”

Now, Dr Sameer Kaul of Apollo has joined the handle for free consultations.

Raina and Shah say that they continue to be up for nearly 20 hours every day. They assert that it’s not easy to find a compatible partner and most of the times donors that do not have enough antibodies are often refused. “We need to find more matches to see what suits a patient’s needs,” Raina says.

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