"Is this COVID
or just the flu?"

I'm writing this to share a story from a strange, confusing time—one that feels distant now, but shaped who I am.

The early days of COVID-19 were chaos. Nobody knew what was happening. People were scared, misinformation was everywhere, and one question was on everyone's mind: Do I have it?

The problem was simple—how do you tell the difference between a common flu and COVID-19? The symptoms overlapped. People were panicking over every cough, every fever. And in India, most of the information was only available in English or Hindi.

I was 18, at home in Srirangapatna, Karnataka. My father is a health inspector—I grew up understanding how critical it is for people to receive health information in their own language. So I decided to build something.

COVIDSELFCHECK.APP was a browser-based, qualitative COVID-19 risk assessment tool. No app downloads. No sign-ups. Just answer a few questions and get a clear assessment—could this be COVID-19, or is it more likely the common flu?

I built it in 72 hours and launched it on March 31, 2020. The original distribution was in Karnataka, in Kannada—a language spoken by 60 million people but ignored by every other symptom checker at the time.

Within hours, it spread. We translated it into 7 Indian languages. The Deputy CM of Karnataka asked to integrate it into the state's helpline—on live television. Strangers showed up to help: doctors, engineers, professors, students. In 24 hours, we had served over 4,500 people.

A week later, Emergent Ventures—a program run by Tyler Cowen at the Mercatus Center—awarded us a $4,000 grant. Shruti Rajagopalan championed our project. Their support made it possible to expand to more languages. Without them, none of this would have happened.

But this was a rapidly evolving time. Shortly after, the Government of India launched Aarogya Setu—a nationwide symptom checker that was later used for contact tracing. My efforts were short-lived in the market. The moment had passed.

And that's okay.

I built something when it was needed. It helped people during the most confusing weeks of the pandemic. It was open source from day one. And then the world moved on—as it should.

Thank you for reading. This page exists so I don't forget what those 72 hours taught me: that sometimes the right thing to build is the simple thing, in the right language, at the right time.