By Yusupha Jobe
Head of Epidemiology and disease control program at the Ministry of Health has made it clear that lack of street names and signage in the communities across the country is making their job difficult in term of contacting or tracing potential Covid-19 patients in the country.
Sanna Sambou made this remark yesterday during a visit by some journalists to Covid-19 emergency call center located at the Central Medical Store, Kotu.
“Looking at the geographical nature of the country most areas are only given names but not existing on papers. So if streets were given official names and exist on papers it would have made our contact tracing work so easy. But streets are not named and this is no doubt makes it difficult to quickly trace anyone that contracted COVID-19,” he explained.
Giving example, he said people will call and tell them that they are in Latrikunda Sabiji but the exact place will not know because of lack of street name. This is part of the challenges his unit is facing.
He said “right now we rely on tracing our contact through phone call, which is presently going normal as we able to trace a lot of contacts calling the 1025 Covid-19 free toll number,” he said.
Among other challenges as disclosed is that some people will call the government provided 1025 free toll number just to say “they do not belief in the existence of the pandemic in the country.”
“Sometimes we receive phone call from people trying to deny the existence of the virus in the country. And I think this is the best time for the media to start engaging people so they can belief in the existence of the pandemic,” he appealed.
