Epidemiologists and public health experts from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) have developed a new COVID-19 Mystery Case Tracker to save time in contact tracing investigations.
Minister for Health, Martin Foley said the Tracker was believed to be the first of its kind to be created in-house in Australia and could save epidemiologists hours of time.
“The Mystery Case Tracker is a tool that supports the Department’s epidemiologists in their investigations into cases of coronavirus with an unknown source of acquisition – colloquially known as ‘mystery cases’ and could go on to be used to help with tracking other infectious diseases,” Mr Foley said.
“The Mystery Case tracker is ‘fed’ contact tracing data and generates a digital diagram that maps the links between cases and contacts, and their movements,” he said.
“Getting accurate information is vital and our contact tracers as always rely on people to be honest and accurate and to remember visiting places for a week or more before they developed symptoms.”
Mr Foley said the Tracker would enable expert contact tracers to process data and links from different sources into a faster, user friendly set of connections to help detect and trace outbreaks and contacts faster.
“Meaning we can better stop outbreaks in their tracks,” the Minister said.
“The Mystery Tracker will continue to evolve with new elements being introduced, including expanded location identification capability, and automated alerts about potential new outbreaks,” he said.
