The African Union Is Set To Unveil Bio-Surveillance Technology To Curtail COVID-19 Spread

Paul Balo, September 16, 2020

The African Union is the umbrella body that represents all African nations. The African Union agreed to empower the African Center for Disease Control (ACDC) to take early actions in curtailing the spread of Coronavirus. Meanwhile, the African Centers for Disease Control is a task force set up by the African Union on the 5th of February before the outbreak spread across the world to become a global pandemic.

Nevertheless, with roughly 1,293,172 confirmed cases and over 1,031,905 cases set to have recovered from COVID-19 across the African region, the continent as a whole seems to be the least hit of the continents to have suffered from the COVID-19, African has reported less 5 percent confirmed cases and one percent of mortality rate.

In terms of protecting its citizens, the African Union established new governing policies relating to the economy, education, and its borders. In other words, regular human activity such as conducting daily business operations, education, and traveling across the globe was temporarily closed to help curtail the spread of the COVID-19 saga. Ever since the regulations were established, the standard of living of every African citizen has crashed poorly, but it seems not to be enough reason to lift restrictions that have been saving the African lives. So, the Union sets to reopen the African economy, and encourage the leaders of each country to install innovative technologies, especially at their borders.

Moreover, to quicken the resumption of human activities, the AU teaming up with ACDC came up with the save lives, economies, and livelihoods campaign to unify Africans, creating awareness across all the African region about the new Pan-African bio-surveillance platform called ”PanaBIOS” technology. The save lives, economy, and livelihood campaign is sponsored by a consortium of private and public organizations such as the ECONET Group, Koldchain BioCordon, African Tourism Board, and other Pan-African organizations contributing their resources to visualized the PanaBIOS platform to a reality.

The PanaBIOS platform is a mobile-based global health informative platform, backed by secure blockchain technology to track-tested personnel. #PanaBIOS #Africa #AU Click To Tweet

The PanaBIOS platform is a mobile-based global health informative platform, backed by secure blockchain technology to track-tested personnel. PanaBIOS is a centralized platform that captures an individual’s COVID-19 test and results data then transfers the information across authorized health facilities within the African region. The data derived from the PanaBIOS app is highly confidential, the information can also be shared amongst friends and family based on personal discretion in essence to Personal Data Privacy.

Ghana happens to be the only country taking advantage of the PanaBIOS bio-surveillance platform since its borders have been reopened making them the pioneer users of the technology to curtailing the spread of COVID-19. Moreover, the PanaBIOS platform also serves as clearance for travelers to gain access to another country with the use of the USSD passcode generated by the PanaBIOS system.

On Personal Data Privacy, and the laws attached to data protection, only 27 out of 54 countries in Africa have active data protection and privacy policy which pose a minor setback to the effectiveness of the PanaBIOS platform across the entire African region. Ghana on the other hand has established new legislation for the better chance to fight the COVID-19. The only challenge Ghana would be facing is the compilation of all the information of its citizens under the PanaBIOS database for easy tracking.

Moreover, the Ghanaian government got assistance from telecom companies collecting information on their subscriber’s database, mobile money merchant codes, mobile money transfer data, addresses, and subscriber cell reference data. In other words, the data derived from the PanaBIOS app is only meant for statistical analysis and not to target individuals but for tracking purposes.