WHO COVID-19 Contact Tracing Form

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The World Health Organization (WHO) has provided a protocol for investigating the first few cases and contact investigation for COVID-19. You can find an ODK version of the minimum reporting form for this protocol at WHO COVID-19 Minimum Reporting Form.

The protocol also describes contact tracing procedures and data analysis. @ARIF_AZAD_KHAN and @Xiphware have made a WHO COVID-19 contact reporting XLSForm available. Thank you!

@ARIF_AZAD_KHAN, @Xiphware and I have all carefully reviewed this but it has not gone through the same level of testing as the other COVID-19 forms that have been shared. This should be treated as a starting point and will need customization when deploying.

In particular, the workflow for identifying contacts and following up with them needs to be carefully designed. How will data collectors get in touch with the contacts to perform their interviews? Someone deploying this form would likely want to do something like produce a data file that associates data collectors with contacts assigned to them. Data collectors could then first select their name followed by the contact that they are following up with. This file would need to be updated at least daily as some contacts are followed-up with and new ones are identified.

This is a very long form so I think it's particularly important to carefully consider what analysis and follow-up will be done. Is it important to know every single time that there was contact between the contact and the primary case or could the latest 5 encounters be sufficient? Is international travel still relevant at this point in the evolution of transmission? Are all the details of every serology test going to be useful?

If you plan on using a version of this form and/or are interested in the types of decisions that go into form design, please discuss below or leave comments in the document.

CC @dmoran

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Congrats @LN @yanokwa and all that have been involved.

I have not related in any way with COVID-19 data collection already, but reading WHO protocol, I saw they recommend an application to use for data collection and tracking: Go.Data. Questions: Is Go.Data related to ODK? Why Govs, institutions, or others would use ODK instead of Go.Data?

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Good question, @Alexander_Torrado , and one of the reasons we didn’t immediately publish ODK versions of the protocol. However, as we’ve been talking to folks directly involved in the pandemic response, none has seen Go.Data in action. It claims to be GPL but has no public source available which is a violation of that license. It’s unclear if and how support is provided to WHO country offices. For decision-makers who already have data collectors and project managers with deep experience using ODK, it may not feel worth it to try a system about which very little is known.

From the page you’ve shared, “This tool will be made available in due course globally to WHO staff, Member states and Partners” suggests it may just not be ready yet. As for whether it’s related to ODK, we saw a slide deck about Go.Data that used pictures and screenshots of ODK but we think those were likely used as placeholders. No one from the ODK project has been involved as far as I know.