Leveraging Polio GIS platforms in the African Region for mitigating Covid-19 contact tracing and Surveillance challenges (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The growth of the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in Africa is an urgent public health crisis. Estimated models project over 150,000 deaths and 4,600,000 hospitalizations in the first year of disease in the absence of adequate interventions. Electronic contact tracing and surveillance, therefore, offers a critical role in decreasing COVID-19 transmission; yet if not conducted properly can rapidly become a bottleneck for synchronized data collection, case detection, and case management. While the continent is currently reporting relatively low COVID-19 cases, digitized contact tracing mechanisms and surveillance reporting are necessary for standardizing real-time reporting of new chains of infection to quickly reverse growing trends and halt the pandemic. OBJECTIVE This article aims to describe a COVID-19 contact tracing and health facility surveillance smart phone app with real-time visualization platform which was developed by the AFRO GIS centre, in collaboration with the WHO EPR team, through the expertise and experience gained from the numerous digital apps that had been developed for Polio surveillance and immunization programme in the WHO's Polio programme in the African Region. METHODS We repurposed the Geographic Information System(GIS) infrastructures of the Polio Programme and database structure which relies on mobile data collection built on Open data Kit( ODK) and harnessed the visualization of real-time COVID-19 data using dynamic dashboards built on Power BI , ArcGIS online and Tableau . The contact tracing app was developed with the pragmatic considerations of COVID-19 peculiarities . the app underwent testing by field surveillance colleagues to meet the requirements of linking contacts to cases and monitoring chains of transmission. The Health Facility Surveillance App was developed from the knowledge and assessment of models of surveillance at health facility for other diseases of public health importance .It was added as an appendage to the preexisting surveillance form called the Integrated Supportive Supervision( ISS) app .These two mobile apps collected information on cases and contact tracing alongside alerting information on any COVID-19 reports from Health Facility levels which are linked to visualization platforms to enable actionable insights . RESULTS So far, the contact tracing app and platform was piloted between April and June 2020 then put to use in Zimbabwe, Benin , Cameroon, Uganda, Nigeria and South Sudan and its use had generated some palpable successes with respect to COVID-19 surveillance. However the COVID-19 health facility based Surveillance app has been more extensively used in 27 countries in the region. CONCLUSIONS In light of the above, this article was written to give an overview on the apps and visualization platform development, deployment, ease of replicability and preliminary outcome evaluation of its use on the field. From the regional perspective, integration of the contact tracing and surveillance data into one platform provides AFRO with a more accurate method of monitoring country efforts in their response to COVID-19, while guiding public health decisions and the assessment of risk for COVID-19.