After 5 weeks, @MinofHealthUG finally showed up to test me. My concerns were validated. We’re at less than 60 cases only by the grace of God. The health officers ONLY learned of me after visiting @enamara yesterday. Yet we were on the same flight.

Turns out the ledger where staff at EBB recorded passenger details wasn’t even transcribed and was probably lost. Florence didn’t even know which flight I was on. Had someone not called @enamara, they wouldn’t have known about our travel pod.

Even though we self isolated for 2 weeks, that’s still 5 weeks(!!!) without contact. What if we were asymptomatic silent carriers after 2 weeks? However difficult its causing all of us headaches, I fully support this lock down, just to give our frontline workers time to catch up.

We have a long way to go in terms of civic systems design. Interoperability of data is critical to rapid response. When we landed, EBB wrote our information in a hand-written ledger, yet 50m away, passport control info was readily available. Why wasn’t that data used to track us?

All the pieces we need to have better systems are available. What isn’t available is people with enough common sense and institutional will to make it happen. Our love affair with stacks of bureaucratic paperwork needs to end because it’s putting all of us at risk.

For example, the heath workers that visited me this morning were jailed yesterday because they were given fake movement passes, yet their passes are the most critical. Florence had 60 people on her list to track down. How do you catch up when the police is harassing you daily?

Apparently the first few weeks of contact tracing, workers didn’t even have PPEs for field work. But Ministers are pocketing 20m UGX each. Front line tracers should be the ones with full police escorts. Our priority misalignment will be the death of us all.

I salute our frontline workers, who are doing the most with least amount of support. I’ve been saying, they wouldn’t have to work so hard if we planned better. We need to talk about data interoperability across the country. Cause this fumbling our way through a crisis is not it.

I also appeal to those who are dodging the contact tracing workers. Seriously, how selfishly stupid are you? Avail yourself so we eliminate all doubt & threats. Your recklessness could come back to haunt you when you put your loved ones in harms way. Save us all & avail yourself.