Premier Refilwe Mtsweni-Tsipane today launched the provincial Covid-19 Command Centre and a tracking application, the Siyayinqoba Sisonke mobile app. The name invites all communities across the province to work together with government in the fight against this pandemic.
Information for this app will be collected during mass community screening, both through door-to-door screening and information gathered in an online questionnaire on the Mpumalanga Department of Health website. This data will then be uploaded onto the app.
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According to the premier, this will help the province in tracing and tracking patients who have tested positive for Covid-19 coronavirus and those who show possible symptoms, thus ensuring that such cases are dealt with faster.
The public will not have access the app, but provide the necessary information through the online questionnaire. The premier assured the public that information will be dealt with in a sensitive manner. Some information, for example, will be for doctors’ eyes only.
She said the questionnaire consists of about 49 questions, but that it could be completed in about three minutes.
“Data collected through the app will be disseminated and processed in real time in the Covid-19 nerve centre which will be receiving live information from the field as the exercise progresses. The dashboard in the nerve centre will reflect all our hotspots in the province. We have about seven hotspots out of 19 municipalities. The data will be location based in order to enable a timeous response.”
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The app will allow the following:
- Assessment of health facility readiness.
- Scheduling home visits by community screening teams
- Monitoring how many people are tested on a daily basis
- Monitoring distribution of new cases which will give alerts of hotspots
- Monitoring recovery of patients and also de-isolation
- 24/7 access to health practitioners who can advise and analyse citizens
“It further allows citizens to establish their own risk level. Citizens are given access to the same questionnaire that is used during door-to-door screening. Once they fill out their information we’ll have our clinicians available in the nerve centre to assess the data.
The questionnaire provides location and contact information should there be a further need for contact. The app will also limit the door to door contact to some extent,” said the premier.
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She urged communities across the province to use this platform to conduct self-assessment. She urged the media to advertise the app and educating the community about it, so everybody partakes.
“Mpumalanga has about 4,5 million citizens and at the end of the day if in the first month we can see a picture of about 500 000 citizens, we shall have made tremendous strides.”
The app was a collaboration effort between the Office of the Premier, the Department of Health, and Broadreach Vantage which is a developmental partner for the United States agency for international development.
