Panviva says it can help fast track COVID-19 tracing in Victoria

A Melbourne-developed system in use in the US to track COVID-19 could help its home state fight the virus, its makers say.

COVID-19 tracers in Victoria would have to complete almost 5000 hours of work in a day to get on top of the outbreak as the rate of daily new cases remains in the hundreds, despite the state being in lockdown for the past two weeks.

Melbourne-based technology company Panviva is assisting the US tracing effort in three states, including Florida, and chairman Ron Finkel has been in contact with Australian state and federal health authorities to deploy its platform locally.

The Victorian government deployed 1000 “disease detectives” in April, and following the fresh surge in infections, which began last month, has called on the Australian Defence Force and others to assist in COVID-19 tracing.

It is a mammoth task, particularly after Victoria recorded 403 new cases and five deaths on Thursday, following a record 484 new infections on Wednesday.

Mr Finkel said tracing needed to be completed quickly to reduce the chances of further infection. Victorian health authorities are sometimes taking four days or longer to complete a trace.

“For every day that a potential community transmission is out there and not traced is a day for further transmission,” Mr Finkel told The Australian.

Panviva’s platform aims to help speed up the work of tracers, who spend about an hour on average interviewing each COVID-19 contact, and each contact usually generates a further 10 contacts that need to be interviewed and details submitted to the health tracking system.

This meant that on Wednesday when there were 484 new cases in Victoria, tracers needed to spend about 4840 hours interviewing COVID-19 contacts to investigate the source of the inventions, and on Thursday, that workload increased by a further 4030 hours.

“It’s a significant amount of work, there is no question about it,” Mr Finkel said.

“It requires a lot of manpower and we are currently drawing on people who are not trained for this purpose but who can be brought to competency quite quickly if they have the right tools.

“It’s a national imperative to be able to do quick treating and then rapid contact tracing. Without those two things we are up the creek without a paddle.”

Panviva’s platform uses call-centre scripts to eliminate the need for extensive training and equips tracers with the necessary information to identify the sources of infections.

It aggregates all the information a tracer needs to quickly do the job in one place.

The company provides its call-centre software to Westpac, ANZ, Medibank, Foxtel and Telstra, as well as other blue chip companies, and recently pivoted to COVID-19 tracing in the US.

Florida, which has a population of about 21 million and has reported around 5000 COVID-19 deaths, is using Panviva’s platform, as well as Indiana and Arizona, which signed up this week.

But to date, the technology has not been deployed in its home market. Mr Finkel said he had contacted Health Minister Greg Hunt and state health authorities about the rollout of Panviva’s platform in Australia.

“If the number of COVID-19 cases are going to continue at 300-400 a day, it puts a tremendous amount of pressure on resources, and they just need the tools.

“This is an opportunity for the Victorian DHHS to use a proven tool that is fast, efficient, effective, costs bugger all, that will actually ease the load and get a better outcome because it will do it faster.”