The wristbands will have a QR code imprinted on them for the authorities to carry out surveillance on PUIs or those required to undergo quarantine.
KUCHING: The State Disaster Management Committee will be issuing QR-coded wristbands to visitors entering Sarawak to ensure that the authorities can monitor their whereabouts during the Movement Control Order (MCO).
The wristbands, engineered by the Sarawak Multimedia Authority (SMA), will be divided into categories before they are handed out, which are person-under-investigation (PUI) or those required to undergo a home quarantine, which is the 14-day Stay Home Notice category, due to the spread of Covid-19.
The PUI category will have two sub-categories: Home Quarantine and Hospital Quarantine. On a twice-daily basis, wearers are required to report their situation by scanning their wristband’s QR code to submit a set of information.
Data collated will allow the State Disaster Management Committee to make informed decisions as well as to conduct random checks on the wearers.
The wearers’ location will enable the Disaster Management Committee to establish hotspots – a key strategy to isolate further spread of the disease.
Variations of such tracker systems have been deployed in China, Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong where the data collected was crucial to manage the shape and evolution of the virus.
“We are confident that this system will make the task of managing the outbreak effectively and in a timely manner given the vastness of Sarawak. With the time frame given, the development team has made tremendous achievements within a 3-day period to come up with such a solution,” said SMA general manager Dr Zaidi Razak in a statement issued today.
The State Disaster Management Committee had earlier enlisted SMA to develop a digital system to track any person who is undergoing self-quarantine for Covid-19.