Just one month ago on March 14th, South Africa’s National Department of Health (NDoH) launched COVID-19 CONNECT, a WhatsApp-based helpline that delivers accurate, up-to-date information on the coronavirus to people living in South Africa. It was followed on March 20th by the World Health Organization (WHO) which launched WHO HealthAlert globally, to give prompt, reliable and official information 24 hours a day about COVID-19.
The adoption of these platforms has been astounding with over 137 million messages delivered to over 4.5 million individuals to date in South Africa, and over 12 million users now active on WHO’s platform globally.
We would like to thank our partners at WHO and the National Department of Health for working with us to get these services up-and-running so quickly. As Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO, said: “Digital technology gives us an unprecedented opportunity for vital health information to go viral and spread faster than the pandemic, helping us save lives and protect the vulnerable.”
Since offering our HealthAlert service available at no charge to health ministries across the globe during the COVID-19 outbreak we have already launched in Mozambique, Ethiopia, New Zealand and Australia, with more to follow.
Access to vital information at scale is crucial. Our HealthAlert technology is available to any country that would like to implement it. If you can help to implement this service to provide up to date, accurate COVID-19 information on WhatsApp in your region then please let us know by filling out the application form available here.
