Yoseph Seyoum, CEO of PhantomALERT, is leading a new initiative that "seeks to hire, train and deploy thousands of Ethiopian Diaspora members to do contact tracing.” (Courtesy photo)
Tadias Magazine
By Tadias Staff
Updated: July 1st, 2020
New York (TADIAS) — Below is an audio of our follow up interview with Yoseph Seyoum, CEO of PhantomALERT, a Washington D.C.-based technology company that we had previously featured when they offered a free application service to track and map the COVID-19 outbreak in real time. Now they have repurposed their app to create a national database that will help Ethiopians in the U.S. especially those with multilingual skills to find jobs as contact tracers in the community.
According to the New York State Department of Health contact tracing is “the process of contacting all people who’ve had contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Contact Tracers have been hired and trained to work with state-of-the-art software to gather information on the spread of the infection.”
The method has long been a major public health tool to prevent the resurgence of infectious diseases. Experts estimate that the U.S. will need to hire hundreds of thousands of contact tracers in the months and years ahead to help control the spread of coronavirus.
Yoseph Seyoum, who is collaborating with Ethiopian-American healthcare professional groups, the Ethiopian Embassy and other community organizations on the initiative shares that this project “is managed and executed by a team of volunteers. We are all contributing based on our expertise and none of us expect any monetary compensation. We are responding to the global call to action to fight the pandemic. We are doing it for our families, for our country, and for the world. We are all in it together. We all must work together.”
Below is an audio of our interview with Yoseph Seyoum:
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If you are interested in becoming a COVID-19 Contact Tracer, you can learn more and register here: https://tracers.ethiodiasporacovid.com/
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