Quarterly Newsletter of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, June 2020

Optimizing contact tracing for COVID-19 in Africa

Disease outbreaks occur frequently, and no two outbreaks are ever the same.
There are always differences in magnitude and spread, and the ability to control and reduce fatality due to the outbreak will depend on the depth of scientific knowledge about the disease, availability of approved and well-known medical treatment, and the capacity of the healthcare system to put the disease under control.

Irrespective of the nature of an outbreak, testing and contact tracing are very critical to effectively break the transmission chain as quickly as possible. COVID-19 is a new disease with a different aetiology from previous types of coronavirus diseases already known to scientists. Given the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic, nonpharmaceutical actions appear to be the only practical and logical option in the absence of any known antiviral drug or vaccine.