Uganda’s Model (UgaMod) towards the Rapid Control of COVID-19 Outbreak: Utilizing a Public Health Emergency Governance Mechanism

The outbreak of COVID-19 has been of global health concern since its outbreak in Wuhan China, in December 2019. It is still a global public health emergency for the entire world, and threatens human life, economic dignity and public health security. As of August 31, 2022, there have been 607,330,258 cases worldwide, 6,492,385 deaths, and 583,355,283 recoveries. There are currently 17,482,590 active cases, where 17,439,463 (99.8%) are mild while 43,127 (0.2%) are serious or critical. Of these, 169,396 cases, 100,431 recoveries, and 3,628 deaths are attributable to Uganda. To address the outbreak, Uganda undertook to implement timely and multiple prevention measures, and also incorporated effective and targeted public health emergency governance. In this paper, we present Uganda’s model (UgaMod) that was used to contain the COVID-19 outbreak from a public health emergency governance approach. This approach stemmed from standard operating procedures, mitigation strategies and measures by the Ugandan government, which included enforcement of public response and adherence, setting up multi-sectoral teams and task forces for monitoring and evaluation, scaling up emergency response capacities to respond, and engaging communities in the basic epidemic prevention, control and response.