In mid-March 2020, images coming from hospitals in Northern Italy shocked us. We became extremely worried that the public health system in Greece would be overwhelmed by the pandemic, as was happening in Italy. The co-founders of Ideas Forward, Nikolaos Tsoniotis, Stefanos Tsiakmakis and Dimitrios Kourtesis were wondering if we could do something to help, using our entrepreneurial thinking, our engineering background and our access to the local startup community. We dropped the idea of starting a volunteer group at the start-up hub of OK!Thess and set up COVID-19 Response Greece.
A community of engineers, scientists, health professionals and entrepreneurs came together, working at start-up-speed to come up with open and free technical solutions for the production of protective equipment. First and foremost we had to help healthcare workers protect themselves, so that they could keep treating those who fell ill with COVID-19. So our volunteer community started with the problem of shortages in personal protective equipment and moved quickly.
By 21 March, only two days after we got to work, our volunteers had come up with a smart lightweight design for face shields that could be mass-produced at very low cost — using laser-cut PET, rather than 3D printing. We presented prototypes of our face shield design to the Greek Medical Association on 23 March and got the green light. By 28 March, we had produced and delivered the first batch of 5,000 shields to the Medical Association of Thessaloniki, which were distributed to private doctors and hospitals the next day. Another 5,000 followed the week after.
This was how it started. The group got press, we opened it up and quickly grew to 270 volunteers – Greeks from all over the country and abroad. We started getting requests from hospitals and medical associations all over Greece. In the space of a few weeks we had coordinated the delivery of over 60,000 face shields to 40+ hospitals and 15 medical associations as well as to many NGOs helping refugee camps in Greece.
We gradually found ourselves working on 8 projects in parallel, doing solution research on alternative materials for face masks and non-invasive ventilation devices, building data collection tools, open data APIs and data visualization tools, organizing online webinars by mental health and wellness professionals, helping meet the needs of non-profits for volunteers. At some point there were over 20 volunteers working daily on our projects.
By May 2020, things were looking better and we had the opportunity to slow down. By the end of summer it was clear that the Greek healthcare system was much better prepared and equipped and we could gradually go back to our lives. We felt relieved that the worst case scenario never materialized in Greece. A part of our volunteer group is still working on maintaining and further developing data repositories for COVID-19 cases and test results. The rest of our operations are in hibernation, hopefully never to resume again.
The contribution of our volunteers was recognized by the President of the Hellenic Republic, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, at a special event in Athens, in the summer of 2020.
Publications:
- Kathimerini (07.04.2020). The response of Thessaloniki
- Makedonia (31.03.2020). The Medical Association of Thessaloniki delivered 10.000 masks and face shields to doctors and hospitals
- Voria.gr (07.05.2020). Coronavirus Observatory for the Region of Western Macedonia
- National Documentation Centre (29.04.2020). Practical solutions from scientists and volunteers in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic
- Voria.gr (05.05.2020). Free mental health webinars by COVID-19 Response Greece
