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

UNSTRUCTURED 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, 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 are necessary for standardizing real-time reporting of new chains of infection to quickly reverse growing trends and halt the pandemic.This article aims to describe a COVID-19 contact tracing and health facility surveillancesmart 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 programmes in the WHO’s Polio programme in the African Region. So far, the contact tracing app and platformwas 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. 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 outcome evaluation of its use on the field.