Leveraging Polio Geographic Information System Platforms in the African Region for Mitigating COVID-19 Contact Tracing and Surveillance Challenges: Viewpoint.

BACKGROUND: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in Africa is an urgent public health crisis. Estimated models projected over 150,000 deaths and 4,600,000 hospitalizations in the first year of the disease in the absence of adequate interventions. Therefore, electronic contact tracing and surveillance have critical roles in decreasing COVID-19 transmission; yet, if not conducted properly, these methods 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 in order to quickly reverse growing trends and halt the pandemic. OBJECTIVE: This paper aims to describe a COVID-19 contact tracing smartphone app that includes health facility surveillance with a real-time visualization platform. The app was developed by the AFRO (African Regional Office) GIS (geographic information system) Center, in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) emergency preparedness and response team. The app was developed through the expertise and experience gained from numerous digital apps that had been developed for polio surveillance and immunization via the WHO's polio program in the African region. METHODS: We repurposed the GIS infrastructures of the polio program and the database structure that relies on mobile data collection that is built on the Open Data Kit. We harnessed the technology for 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 the health facility level for other diseases of public health importance. The Integrated Supportive Supervision app was added as an appendage to the pre-existing paper-based surveillance form. These two mobile apps collected information on cases and contact tracing, alongside alert information on COVID-19 reports at the health facility level; the information was linked to visualization platforms in order to enable actionable insights. RESULTS: The contact tracing app and platform were piloted between April and June 2020; they were then put to use in Zimbabwe, Benin, Cameroon, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Sudan, and their use has generated some palpable successes with respect to COVID-19 surveillance. However, the COVID-19 health facility-based surveillance app has been used more extensively, as it has been used in 27 countries in the region. CONCLUSIONS: In light of the above information, this paper was written to give an overview of the app and visualization platform development, app and platform deployment, ease of replicability, and preliminary outcome evaluation of their use in the field. From a regional perspective, integration of contact tracing and surveillance data into one platform provides the AFRO with a more accurate method of monitoring countries' efforts in their response to COVID-19, while guiding public health decisions and the assessment of risk of COVID-19.

Surveillance to Track Progress Toward Polio Eradication - Worldwide, 2019-2020.

When the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) was established in 1988, an estimated 350,000 poliomyelitis cases were reported worldwide. In 2020, 140 wild poliovirus (WPV) cases were confirmed, representing a 99.99% reduction since 1988. WPV type 1 transmission remains endemic in only two countries (Pakistan and Afghanistan), but outbreaks of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV) occurred in 33 countries during 2019-2020 (1,2). Poliovirus transmission is detected primarily through syndromic surveillance for acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) among children aged <15 years, with confirmation by laboratory testing of stool specimens. Environmental surveillance supplements AFP surveillance and plays an increasingly important role in detecting poliovirus transmission. Within 2 weeks of COVID-19 being declared a global pandemic (3), GPEI recommended continuing surveillance activities with caution and paused all polio supplementary immunization activities (4). This report summarizes surveillance performance indicators for 2019 and 2020 in 42 priority countries at high risk for poliovirus transmission and updates previous reports (5). In 2020, 48% of priority countries* in the African Region, 90% in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, and 40% in other regions met AFP surveillance performance indicators nationally. The number of priority countries rose from 40 in 2019 to 42 in 2020.† Analysis of 2019-2020 AFP surveillance data from 42 countries at high risk for poliovirus transmission indicates that national and subnational nonpolio AFP rates and stool specimen adequacy declined in many priority countries, particularly in the African Region, suggesting a decline in surveillance sensitivity and quality. The findings in this report can be used to guide improvements to restore a sensitive surveillance system that can track poliovirus transmission and provide evidence of interruption of transmission.