The hub offers multidisciplinary information on Contact Tracing for a variety of audiences from policymakers, to responders, researchers, educators, affected communities, and the public.
This hub is a public platform for access to the best and most up-to-date resources available to support your contact tracing programs and activities.
The global pandemic of 2020 renewed our awareness of the impact a new pathogen can have on humanity. Contact tracing has been recognized as an effective tool in stopping new infections by breaking chains of transmission and keeping vulnerable populations safe. It can also assist with producing a better understanding of the epidemiological characteristics and transmission dynamics of a new pathogen or a known pathogen in a new context, informing decisions around public health and social measures, and improving disease outcomes through early detection and case management.
This practical guideline allows for improvement of contact tracing strategies, and provides recommendations attempting to answer some, though not all, questions that arose during the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and other outbreaks.
The benefits of contact tracing in the Region depend substantially on clear and defined strategies that outline cohesive contact definitions, processes of monitoring and reporting key indicators, and include recommendations on data collection and analysis tools.
National Strategy for Contact Tracing: a written document (published or unpublished) or guideline that outlines the mechanism for contact tracing activities including, but not limited to, contact definition, period of contact, monitoring of contacts, testing of contacts, and duration of the quarantine.
Monitoring of Contact Tracing Performance or Impact Indicators: the collection of data that facilitates the calculation of one or more of the WHO-recommended indicators for contact tracing.
Digital Contact Tracing Tool or Application: technology that supports the identification, data collection, or follow-up of contacts, symptom trackers as applications used to collect self-reported symptoms, and proximity trackers as applications used to measure proximity and activate alerts to close contacts of an index case when both have downloaded the application.
What is Go.Data? Go.Data is an outbreak investigation tool for field data collection during public health emergencies. The tool includes functionality for case investigation, contact follow-up, visualization of chains of transmission including secure data exchange and is designed for flexibility in the field, to adapt to the wide range of outbreak scenarios. The tool is targeted at any outbreak responder.
