World Health Organization (WHO) Bangladesh increases support for the country’s contact tracing activities by bringing in 98 newly recruited staff and training over 1200 persons around the country in efforts to break the COVID-19 chain of transmission.
Together with DGHS, WHO worked since the beginning of the outbreak for expanding and strengthening contact tracing capacity countrywide, for proper identification of contacts of confirmed cases, guiding people for quarantine or isolation and limit the spread of the virus.
“Contact tracing is an essential part in containing COVID-19 outbreak because early identification of contacts of confirmed cases followed by their quarantine, can break the chain of transmission. This is a very laborious work because it involves tracing contacts of thousands of confirmed cases every day who have interacted with them at home, at workplace or in other settings,” says Dr Rajan Patil, expert epidemiologist from Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) deployed by WHO in support of IEDCR.
The new 98 staff funded by WHO are doctors, lab technicians, data managers and field assistants that are supporting contact tracing at national and divisional level. Out of them, 17 staff work with IEDCR at airports, land and sea ports for passenger screening, providing vital information of contact tracing if any traveller is detected with high temperature during thermal screening and subsequently tests COVID-19 positive. This aspect is particularly important for implementing International Health Regulations and allows inter-country cooperation by notifying origin country of the infected person.
Across Bangladesh, over 2500 Government staff are working to enforce the contact tracing at subdistrict level, 4 in every upazila, in coordinated and systematic efforts to trace persons that have been in contact with confirmed cases. To better prepare the contact tracers, WHO has carried out training activities and over half of them have already undergone the preparation programs.
Additionally, WHO has contributed to further scaling-up of contact tracing by introducing Go Data, a software which allows conducting outbreak investigations, including field data collection, contact tracing and visualization of disease chains of transmission. The software was developed by WHO in collaboration with GOARN and other partner organizations.
In accordance with WHO guidelines, contact tracing and associated steps, such as quarantine of contacts and isolation of cases is conducted with voluntary participation of persons confirmed as positive and their contacts. This allows better participation of population and ensures higher success rates. However, fear of stigma and discrimination are among the major challenges for effective contact tracing.
“We are seeing in many countries that contact tracing is sometimes hampered by fear of stigma and discrimination which makes people unwilling to disclose information about their contacts,” added Dr Rajan.
To overcome the associated stigma and discrimination, WHO together with health partners, UN agencies, national and international organizations is continuously supporting the Government of Bangladesh to conduct information campaigns aiming at sensitizing communities to the need of contact tracing.
WHO remains committed to support Government in implementing the Bangladesh Preparedness and Response Plan, to contain the COVID-19 pandemic through coordinated public health interventions and protective measures.
WHO activities have benefitted of financial support from European Union Humanitarian Aid.