Context: Recently, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has launched an 'online data pool' for combating and containing COVID-19.
About Online Data Pool

• It is a pool of doctors including AYUSH doctors, nurses and other health care professionals, volunteers from NYKs, NCC NSS, and PMGKVY, ex Servicemen etc. for use by the ground level administration at state, district or municipal levels.
• It contains state wise and district wise availability of the large pool of human resources from various groups alongwith contact details of the nodal officers.
• It is available for use by various authorities to prepare Crisis Management/Contingency Plans based on the available manpower, in coordination with nodal officers for each group.
• It can also be used to utilize the services of volunteers for enforcing social distancing at banks, ration shops, mandis and for providing help to elderly, divyangs and orphanages.
• It will also help States/UTs to move human resources from one location to the other for their utilization.
• It also provides on-site delivery of training material/modules through any device (mobile/laptop/desktop).

About High-Level Task Force on COVID-19

• It will be chaired by the Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Shri Luv Aggarwal and co-chaired by Member, Niti Aayog and Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India.
• AYUSH, ICMR, Department of Science and Technology (DST), Department of Biotechnology (DBT), CSIR, DRDO, DG-Health Services and Drug Controller General of India are also members of the task force.
• Its aim is to enable COVID-19 related research by academia, industry and international community.
• It has made Department of Biotechnology (DBT) a central coordinating authority for vaccine development and their main work will be to identify a pathway for vaccine development.
• The clinical cohorts will be focusing on long term follow-up of people for better understanding of the disease and its management will be worked upon.
• The bio-specimens will also be collected which will form the basis for further trials of drugs and vaccines.