The Unsung Heroes of COVID-19
As the world is united in response to COVID-19. We have been recognizing and appreciating all the heroes involved. Our appreciations have mostly been for medical heroes and caregivers. I totally appreciate their efforts and I am in no way trying to undermine them. Today however I want to highlight the efforts of some other heroes. The heroes that have also been working 24/7 for all of us but they are often unseen and unappreciated.
Have you imagined what your life would have been in lockdown if you had no Internet? If there were no apps to communicate with your loved ones if you had no video calls or streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube.
A common man cannot even imagine the amount of pressure on the Internet and web due to lockdown when all the activities of our lives have been transferred online. Most of our work is being done online. Our children do their homework online. The teachers teach online and we have our most important professional meetings online.
All our personal social life is only alive because of the web. A world like this was unimaginable. It is like magic how our life transferred from physical to online.
For the weak and vulnerable the only outlet and socializing have been through the Internet. Their necessities of life, their groceries are ordered online. We get to see our grandparents only with the help of these webcams.
In situations where medical knowledge has stopped us from seeing our loved ones in their final moments, IT has come to rescue and we have been able to see videos and virtually be there for our family members who are in critical condition.
It is sad, that the people who are helping us day in and day out with all these, now basic necessities of life are not appreciated at all.
Here I’m referring to the software engineers the telecom engineers the programmers and app developers the IT professionals and each and every person who is linked in supporting this online network.
The Pressure on the Web due to COVID 19
The Internet is being put under huge pressure globally because of lockdowns during the Covid19 crisis.
Australian researchers created a ‘global internet pressure’ map that reveals the strain COVID-19 is putting on the internet as people are forced to stay at home.
The team examined how each nation’s internet was performing amid the rapid escalation of home-based entertainment, including gaming and streaming films, as well as video-conferencing and other online communication.
‘More people at home means more people online — with big bandwidth appetites,’ said Professor Paul Raschky, an economist at Monash University in Melbourne and co-fonder of KASPR Datahaus.
Telecom Engineers
These are the people behind maintaining all the telecom networks essential for us in these difficult times.
“People are stuck at home — whether they want to watch their box set of Peaky Blinders or somebody’s isolated and they want to keep in touch with family.
“The only way to do that is the telecom network. More importantly these are engineers maintaining the network so it’s there for all the health and emergency services.”
Now let us see how these people are being rewarded, the 5G theories linked to coronavirus have fuelled attacks on telecom engineers
We’ve actually had cases where people have been threatened with being stabbed, threatened with physical violence and in some cases actually threatened with murder,” says Andy Kerr, deputy general secretary of the Communication Workers Union (CWU).
The Developers
The developer community is playing an active and essential role in relief efforts. There have been inspirational responses from developers looking to build crisis response apps and sites to help keep their users and the public informed and healthy. Since the start of the COVID outbreak, many mobile data collection applications have also been developed to help users to report their symptoms and track the disease. In countries like South Korea, these ‘apps’ have gone even further and provided authorities with the ability to alert users when they’ve been in direct contact with a confirmed positive case.
It is because of these developers and the apps they have developed that some countries are able to control and track the spread of Covid19 and return to some sort of normal day to day life.
IT Support Staff
Most of the companies big or small have been forced to provide work from home facilities to their staff. This means that they have given a VPN (a virtual private network) access to their staff. This was only possible because of the continuous support of the IT staff. All the IT infrastructure that is being run requires 24 hours of support. For us, it is simply a matter of sending a command to connect to a network but that network Needs to be checked, so there are physical as well as software related issues.
Just to give a little example last week my University’s network went down and the IT professionals had to work round the clock to restore it. For a couple of hours when the network was down no one could work from home and work life paused until we were rescued by our IT heroes.
Large networks require a lot of maintenance there can be power issues, there can be software errors or there can be other system-related issues invisible to the eyes of an ordinary person.
Even though we do not see these IT professionals working but they have been working hard to make all these systems work appropriately.
Many IT professionals had to upskill themselves so that they could not only solve these problems but also train the other staff members to deal with online issues.
As the world economies cripple under the weight of pandemic these unsung heroes continue to provide our businesses with the best possible solutions to survive.
References
https://developers.google.com/maps/covid19
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-52395771
Sumera Rizwan is a Mother and a Computer Science Graduate. She lives in Derby, UK. She is passionate about expressing her self through her stories. She talks from her heart and aims to touch the hearts of her readers.
