Tracking Haulage in East Africa to support COVID-19 surveillance- THEA-C19

6月13日，在乌干达和肯尼亚交界的布西亚边境，一名卡车司机被发现死于32公里长的卡车队伍中。这一区域供应链的瓶颈是由强制新冠肺炎检测造成的，检测结果需要14-26个小时。等待检测结果不仅意味着新冠肺炎传播到社区的风险增加，而且还意味着水传播和食源性疾病的爆发。至关重要的是，内陆国家的货物和药品供应出现这种延误，进一步威胁到这些人口的健康和福祉。为了缓解这一问题，乌干达卫生部提议测试并允许司机继续行驶，然而，这将需要更快地追踪检测呈阳性的司机，并描述他们的传播风险。为了解决这一限制，我们建议开发和测试专为运输行业量身定做的数字接触者追踪技术。这一办法提供了一个独特的机会，可以利用用户的投入、运输部门的特点、政府、技术公司和学术界的支持，最大限度地利用发展中国家的这类工具。关键的是，该工具将是开源的，这允许在世界其他地区同时测试其实用性。在乌干达，这项技术将向卫生部提供有关地点的信息、病例警报系统、高危司机以及检查站的预期交通量。这加强了公共卫生对新冠肺炎的反应，改善了供应链的区域流动

On the 13th of June, a haulage truck driver was found dead in the 32-kilometre queue of trucks at the Busia border between Uganda and Kenya. This bottleneck in regional supply chain is caused by mandatory COVID-19 testing, whose results take 14-26 hours. Waiting for test results not only represents an increased risk in COVID-19 transmission to communities but also outbreak of water borne and food borne diseases. Critically, such delays in the supply of goods and medicines for land locked countries further threaten the health and wellbeing of these populations. To mitigate this problem, the Ministry of Health of Uganda proposes to test and allow drivers continue with journeys, however, this would require a quicker approach of tracing drivers who test positive, and profile their attributable transmission risk.To address this limitation, we propose to develop and test digital contact tracing technology tailored to the haulage industry. This approach provides a unique opportunity to harness the input of users, characteristics of the haulage sector, support of government, technology firms and academia to maximise uptake and utility of such tools in a developing country context. Critically the tool will be open source, which allows for simultaneous testing of its utility inother parts of the world. In Uganda, the technology will provide the Ministry of health information on location, an alert system for cases, at-risk drivers as well as expected volume of traffic at checkpoints. This strengthens public health responses to COVID-19 and improves regional flow of supply chain