The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has announced that Telecom Egypt, Orange, and Etisalat Misr will launch a joint initiative to provide 12 ventilators and medical supplies to quarantine hospitals. In addition, the initiative will offer personal protective equipment to 200 healthcare workers in these hospitals for a month.
The personal protective equipment will include protective clothing, medical masks, face and head protectors, medical gloves, and other essential supplies.
This comes within the directives of Amr Talaat, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, to support the comprehensive state plan in the face of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Talaat has affirmed that the telecommunication sector provides all possible support to the health sector in light of these exceptional circumstances the country is going through, noting that this initiative comes as a complement to a series of steps launched by the ministry since the beginning of the crisis to support the health system.
The Ministry of Communications has taken several steps to support the health system in light of the repercussions of the coronavirus crisis, through coordination between the National Telecom Regulatory Authority and mobile network operators in Egypt. The most prominent of these steps was adding 200 customer service agents to the Telecom Egypt call centres to absorb the increased incoming calls on the dedicated hotlines 105 and 15335 for inquiries about the disease. The ministry also directed all mobile operators to provide 3,000 voice call minutes and 10 GB per month free of charge for all doctors and nursing staff, administrators, and patients in quarantine hospitals.
