When COVID first hit,
most countries were very unprepared for the scale of the pandemic.
A common response was to close our borders and quarantine people.
Obviously, when in a place like Southern Africa, where we have people
moving across borders all the time, this created a number of challenges.
And then you've also got challenges
related to trade and industry, even aid transporting across borders.
People come across the border to access health services, education, etc.
In a time of a pandemic outbreak such as COVID,
we needed to have better emergency responses at that border.
We needed to build the capacity of all stakeholders, immigration,
peace services, etc., to identify people
who might be coming into the country with a communicable disease such as COVID.
The Global Border Health Team has what we call
our master training program, which is a curriculum
that's two weeks long, if it were completed in its entirety.
However, we worked with the South African National Department of Health
to identify which pieces or topics from that curriculum
that they were most interested in training their own staff on.
And you as
CDC coming to the National Department of Health and saying,
we want to partner with you
and we want to roll out training in your space
regarding border health, which would also ensure
that your port health officials are part of this training, assisted us
that we were then able to confidently go ahead
and then engage with the various stakeholders who worked outside
of the points of entry and sign our various MOUs and even to assist us
to enhance our public health emergency response plans.
So while the training only targeted port health officials,
it armed them with the ability or capacity to be able to train
others at their points of entry on how to help with preparedness
for and response to a public health event.
Because they serve as kind of the first line of defense for a country
in terms of being able to identify potentially ill passengers
that are passing
through the point of entry in order to ensure that those people can get
care as they need it, to then also prevent the further spread of disease
within their own borders or externally outside of their borders.
And because this was an emergency response,
because of the way that we approached
COVID, we ended up with a lot of people just static in one place.
And the SOPs now enabled that movement
and enable people to safely cross borders, to safely travel,
and for groups to move across borders safely in a controlled manner
that didn't contribute to the further spread of COVID.