A team led by a first-year Indian-American medical student from the Harvard Medical School has launched an initiative to help immigrants with information regarding the coronavirus pandemic available in 30 different Indian languages, including Hindi, it was reported.
The team of over 150 medical students led by Pooja Chandrashekar, is developing COVID-19 fact sheets and translating them into 30 languages, which besides Hindi also include Gujarati, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu, reports the American Bazaar.
"As the COVID-19 pandemic is burgeoning, there has been a real lack of accessible health information available in different languages," Chandrashekar told the American Bazaar.
The goal of the project "is to translate accessible COVID-19 information into different languages that we then provide to community-based organizations and clinics", she said.
Chandrashekar's team is developing and translating fact sheets on these topics: COVID-19 Prevention, About COVID-19, COVID-19 Management, COVID-19 for Children, COVID-19 for Pregnant Women.
Based at institutions around the country, the team of medical students is working day and night to translate the COVID-19 info in various languages.
Besides Indian languages, these include Spanish, Mandarin Chinese (Simplified), Mandarin Chinese (Traditional), Farsi, French, Arabic, Filipino, Korean, Malay, German, Russian, Vietnamese, Italian, Portuguese, Armenian, Creole, Swahili, Navajo, Indonesian and Greek.
"The idea for such a project came from my realization that as the COVID-19 pandemic is burgeoning, there has been a real lack of accessible health information available in different languages," the student told the American Bazaar.
"This can prevent certain populations, especially those who are most vulnerable, from knowing when and how to seek care," she added.
The team hopes hopes to have the materials ready by next week.
According to the latest update by Johns Hopkins University, there are currently more than 9,077 confirmed cases and 145 deaths in the US.