Reducing the spread of COVID-19 in road traffic control in Cameroon based on ICT

Abstract

The coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic in 2019, a once-in-a-lifetime event that tested the limits of humanity. The number 2019 is a memorable year that the entire humanity will hardly forget as the world had fitted against this virus. The pandemic has so far changed the habits of people all over the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) has defined a list of barrier measures that have been implemented and are still effective in several countries. Among these measures, social distancing remains the most important. It requires people to avoid physical contact and not to exchange possessions. However, during road checks in Cameroon, police officers usually check passengers by asking them to show their national identity card. After receiving the ID card, a police officer checks the information on the card and returns it to the holder at the end of the check. This process goes beyond the new regulation and contributes to the spread of the Covid'19 virus. This paper considers this issue as an engineering problem and proposes a new approach based on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to carry out the road traffic control activities. An automatic control system is proposed. It has two main functionalities namely the positioning subsystem and the Data collection subsystem. The positioning subsystem allows the road traffic controller in defining the right position where he/she should stand to collect information from passengers while the data collection subsystem collects data from the ID card presented by each passenger in the car. This approach was tested at police checkpoints on the Douala-Yaoundé road in Cameroon and the results showed a reduction in COVID-19 cases related to document handling between police and passengers/drivers.