The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

A self-screening tool to identify and track potential COVID-19 carriers, those in contact with them and persons most at risk was launched yesterday with a target of 15,000 users per week.

The Organisation for Responsible Governance (ORG) has teamed with Think Simple to develop Bahamas Together, which aims to boost the country's fight against the pandemic by tracing possible victims and others they may have infected.

The duo have linked with Bahamas Strong and the HeadKnowles Foundation to help promote Think Simple, and are seeking support from other civil society organisations and the private sector to ensure as many persons as possible sign-up.

Robert Myers, ORG's chairman, said: "The origin of this web-based tool really came out of the fact that we were researching a paper on ways to move through this deadly disease, COVID-19, and we submitted a paper to the prime minister on March 27.

"During that research it was clear to us that there were several significant actions that would help manage and reduce the negative effects of COVID-19. Some of those were large-scale testing and tracking of the populace from the first signs of the virus hitting The Bahamas, and specifically communal infection where is starts to spread within the community as opposed to being brought in from the outside."

While responsibility for COVID-19 testing fell on the government due to the specialised equipment and trained medical professionals required, Mr Myers said tracking was an area where ORG felt it could assist.

"But tracking was something that we thought we could be helpful with providing, and as we were discussing these initiatives with people in the private sector,we quickly identified that Think Simple had considerable capacity to do just that and to work with us on this," he added. "More importantly, they were willing to very kindly work with us at no cost to the government."

Gregory Michelier, Think Simple's president and chief executive, said that "without data and information" The Bahamas is "blind" to the potential spread of COVID-19. This, he added, is the gap that the Bahamas Together self-screening tool is designed to fill.

"We found that most countries who were having the greatest success in combating the virus were putting a great deal of resources into gathering information on contact tracing, which the government has been doing, but we thought we could augment that," he added.

"For us it was important to start out with identifying possible areas of infection so the health professionals could allocate resources to this area, which would allow them to concentrate on educating the community, help them collate their current information with this current information and battle the virus even better.

"We are gathering data to identify high-risk communities, which have large concentrations of elderly people, pre-existing conditions and basically people at higher risk and who require additional protection as well. That's part of the initiative as well, Mr Michelier continued.

"So identifying people with symptoms, identifying people with pre-existing conditions, and identifying people who may have come into contact within the last 14 days; that is kind of the idea. The front end, the one public facing, is a series of questions.

"From there we can map and graph the data, and provide the health officials by area, by island, and break down the data to show them where people are feeling sick and where they are not."

Bahamas Together operates similar to a web portal. Users will be directed to a website, which is the online screening tool, where one can remain anonymous. The web portal is a questionnaire that asks users for their age, sex and area in which they live.

Persons can also give their name and direct location. The tool allows them to update their health status, thereby enabling officials to better monitor where they spend time and resources.

Mr Myers added: "This tracking and understanding where the disease is present and increasing, or decreasing, is critical in our mind. It is critical to the people, the health care professionals and the government, because it allows everyone to better prepare and better manage the ensuing crisis.

"We got to 3,000 in two days, so within a week we probably could have 10,000 or 15,000 [users] if we promote this well. We have limited data now, with only 3,200 users. But where this really gets interesting is where you get it out there widely, and people use it and start propagating the site.

"As soon as that happens what we'll do specifically in the back-end is look at the clusters of those in that data. That's why we say it is private in many ways, because we're not interested in the one, but are interested in where clusters of people aged 65 and above are feeling very unwell.

"We want to know that data, or where somebody was tested positive for COVID-19 and what area they live in, then seeing whether that has any correlation to the other people that might be feeling ill in that area."

Mr Myers reiterated that Bahamas Together will become "very useful" when larger numbers of Bahamians start using the online screening tool, as it will create sufficient data to pass on to healthcare professionals who can then isolate certain hot-spots where COVID-19 may be spreading.