The goal of the system would have been to determine the location and movement of positive cases.
The national health department looked at the feasibility of a surveillance system that could track the movement of citizens to help it fight Covid-19, but it didn’t work out, a national official revealed to Western Cape MPLs.
Between 17 April and 14 May, the department had worked on developing a proof of concept to see whether it would be possible to establish a surveillance system using data provided by mobile network operators. But based on the technology available in South Africa and the volumes of cases expected, it would have taken days for the department to get that information.She said it was difficult to get a person’s location and even more difficult to track their movement, as this information needed to come from cellphone towers.
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