Tracking haulage in East Africa to support COVID-19 surveillance

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 in other 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