The Institut Pasteur of Côte D’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) in the Emergency Management of Air Travellers during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Unique Experience in Supporting the Response Strategy in Côte D’Ivoire from 2021 to 2022

Since its outbreak in December 2019 in Wuhan Province (China), the Coronavirus (COVID-19) disease quickly spread around the world in such a way that most response plans were outdated. There was an urgent need to change and adapt response strategies as the virus globally spread. Entire firms and economies were brought to a standstill in order to reduce the virus’ capacity to spread and to limit some of the short-term impacts in order to save time and find out solutions to come back to a more or less normal way of life. Thus, most of the countries that closed their air, sea and land borders had to reopen them progressively, with travel restrictions submitted to rigid controls. In Côte d’Ivoire, as in all other countries, air travellers leaving the territory were required to provide a certificate for a negative COVID-19 test, valid for 24 to 72 hours depending on the country of destination. However, the national system implemented could not provide a result before 48 hours. The objective of this work was to develop an alternative strategy to the system for air travellers who were in a hurry and those who had a computer bug in obtaining their result. A total of 38,444 air travellers benefited from this strategy implemented by the Institut Pasteur de Côte d’Ivoire during these two years.