WHO Bangladesh recently recruited nearly 100 new staff and trained 1 200 personnel around the country to strengthen its work to help the country break the COVID-19 chain of transmission.
Together with Bangladesh’s Directorate General of Health Services, WHO has worked to expand and strengthen contact tracing capacity countrywide since the beginning of the outbreak. This is an essential part in containing COVID-19 because identifying contacts of confirmed cases, followed by quarantine, can break the chains of transmission.
The additional staff funded by WHO are doctors, lab technicians, data managers and field assistants who are supporting contact tracing at the national and divisional level. Seventeen staff will work at airports, land and sea ports to carry out passenger screening, provide information and follow up on positive COVID-19 cases.
WHO has also contributed to further scaling-up contact tracing in Bangladesh by introducing Go Data, a software that assists outbreak investigations with field data collection, contact tracing and visualization of disease chains of transmission. The software was developed by WHO in collaboration with Global Outbreak and Response Network (GOARN) and other partner organizations.
WHO remains committed to supporting the government and the Bangladesh Preparedness and Response Plan to contain COVID-19.