Under the leadership of the Ministry of Health, we have already established a protocol for all incoming travelers to complete a declaration form, for that information to be entered into a disease surveillance platform and for that information to be shared with the public health monitoring system for active surveillance.
As this system relies purely on self declaration, it leaves room for the possibility of travelers not being honest about their status and travel history as they would be attempting to avoid mandatory quarantine.
We propose to integrate several data sources that are available to improve the overall architecture of the system to ensure use of reliable information and to provide an automated approach for every traveler to be recorded into the surveillance system. The proposed solution eliminates the use of a questionnaire to capture critical information such as flight information and only uses it for epidemiological surveillance questions.
We further propose a Web based database of all Sri Lankans living outside of the country and a voluntary mobile app based location surveillance system to help manage contact surveillance.
We believe this system can be finalized and deployed over the weekend and go live by Monday March 16th, 2020.