WeGO holds first webinar on COVID-19 best practice
May 29, 2020
SEOUL – WeGO held its first webinar as a part of the Smart Health Responder, a new initiative aiming to support members and partners, by providing them with useful information to tackle the current pandemic.
Entitled “Sharing COVID-19 measures with local governments, smart tech solution providers and healthcare professionals”, the online session addressed key questions and highlighted successful policies in response to COVID-19 by different stakeholders.
High-ranking public officials from Bangkok, Seoul and Vladivostok shared their best practices in dealing with the virus in their cities. The presentations repeatedly emphasized that – from a specialized website to raise citizens’ awareness, to digital tracing and emergency text alerts, to a multilingual AI-platform for COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment – on top of prompt responses and citizen-centered policies, digital solutions have been key to handle the pandemic efficiently.
Private companies Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA and Imagga also described how their ICT solutions have helped assist local governments in coping with the virus in Italy and Bulgaria, respectively. The last speaker from the biotechnology company Psomagen ended the discussion by explaining what can be done going forward from a medical perspective, the possibility for a vaccine and the new behaviors individuals, organizations and governments will have to adopt to cope with the “new normal”.
WeGO’s president and mayor of Seoul, and the mayors of Makati City and Wellington expressed their support for WeGO’s new webinar series in their welcoming remarks, and the importance of international cooperation in the current situation.
The next webinar in the series of three is scheduled for July, and will focus on the response to COVID-19 in North and Latin America. Aside from its own, WeGO will also contribute to webinars organized by its partners, such as UCLG Africa and the Smart City Institute Japan, in the coming months.
Watch the full recording of the webinar here.
