ICT goes all out to fight COVID-19

The government has put its best foot forward in using ICT tools to figure out the COVID-19 challenges and has already brought on board popular mobile applications and locally-developed solutions to control the damages caused by the pandemic.

"So far, we have customised and launched a bunch of solutions partnering with global communication platforms and now we can predict what will be the scenario after 15 days," said Zunaid Ahmed Palak, state minister for information and communication technology.

The ICT division of the government has already established partnerships with all four popular mobile communication applications -- Messenger, WhatsApp, Imo and Viber -- and is offering different services using the channels.

As part of a series of initiatives, the ICT division yesterday declared its partnership with Viber, which has 1.5 crore active users in Bangladesh, and through online self-assessments, users can now find out if they are running the risks of coronavirus infections.

"We earlier launched coronavirus assessment tools on Messenger and some websites but our target is to offer ICT support to all the citizens of the country and that's why we have introduced the same service on Viber with extensive information," Palak said.

About 1.67 lakh people have so far taken services from a government website – livecoronatest.com, said Ashraf Abir, managing director and chief executive officer of MCC Ltd, a local ICT firm that developed the site.

"We have shared all the contacts with the Directorate General of Health Services and doctors are talking with the patients who seem to bear high risks of contagion," Abir said.

Palak said there are options to call 333 or 16263 and use other platforms of the government to get coronavirus-related information and services.

Earlier the government sent short messages to mobile phone users and launched an interactive voice response service for the same purpose, he added.

Gathering all the information in a data analytics platform, the government is inching towards new estimation through the use of artificial intelligent and big data analytics, Palak added.

"A good number of local data analytics experts with the support of some non-resident Bangladeshi are trying to get an idea what the future holds for us," he said.

The state minister said though there is no data privacy act in the country, users should not worry about privacy protection as there will be no leakage of information.

In the next phase, the government needs to go for contact tracing, a method used to slow down the spread of infectious outbreaks, according to Palak.

The ICT division earlier launched bot on the WhatsApp platform to disseminate coronavirus-related information easily and introduced a healthcare call centre on Imo for 22 lakh Bangladeshi expatriates living in Saudi Arabia.

The government is taking support from Facebook and Google to spread the government's messages on coronavirus.

Palak said they are now trying to put in place a mechanism to run educational programmes on mobile phones as schools are closed because of the pandemic.