MILTON, Ont. – The Private Motor Truck Council of Canada (PMTC) has endorsed the use of contact tracing to help stop the spread of Covid-19.

“To flatten the curve, as the medical community refers to it, early warning of the transmission of the Covid-19 virus is key to stopping the spread,” the organization said in a release. “Technology has been designed to understand the numerous points of contact one person might have to others to limit the spread of the virus within a fleet. In the case of professional truck drivers, many of whom travel across multiple jurisdictions, and into hot spots, sacrificing their own health and well-being to ensure we have what we need, contact tracing is critical to ensure we limit any possible exposure of COVID-19, for the protection of the driver, their families, and the general public.”

The PMTC board elected to support early contact tracing as a recommended best practice.

“Private fleets, and the Industry as a whole, are in an excellent position to make use of ‘early contact’ tracing as an additional measure for proactively addressing Covid-19 to protect drivers and to minimize the chance of outbreaks,” the PMTC said. “Fleet data collected from the truck’s GPS/ELD systems, already installed by many fleets, makes it easy to do early contact tracing and is not intrusive from a data privacy standpoint as the data for tracing where a driver has been and who they have been in the vicinity of is already available to fleets from these devices.”