When COVID-19 began moving through communities around the world in early 2020, a word that had previously belonged mostly to public health professionals entered everyday conversation: tracing. Contact tracing, case tracing, exposure tracing. For those of us who work in supply chain traceability, the language sounded familiar — and the more closely we looked at how pandemic response actually works, the more obvious the parallels became.
A Working Definition
ISO defines traceability as the ability to trace the history, application, and location of whatever you happen to be considering. In fisheries and agriculture, that translates into something quite specific: knowing where a product was harvested, capturing every transaction it passes through, recording the processing it undergoes, and tracking its journey through distribution and onto a buyer’s plate.
A pandemic, in turn, is a disease outbreak that has spread across wide geographic areas. COVID-19 became the global example almost overnight.
The two domains might look unrelated at first glance, but the underlying discipline is remarkably similar.
Contact Tracing Looks a Lot Like Supply Chain Tracing
When public health teams trace contacts, they’re trying to identify everyone an infected person has come into contact with, then monitor those individuals for symptoms or onward transmission. The work depends on capturing accurate information at each interaction point and being able to follow the chain backwards or forwards as new information appears.
That’s almost exactly what we do when we trace a shipment of seafood or produce. We identify the origin, capture each handover between stakeholders, and reconstruct the path from one end of the supply chain to the other. Different domain, same shape.
The Common Foundation: Data Management
Both disciplines run on the same foundation: a robust electronic system for capturing and managing information that grows quickly and needs to stay reliable under pressure. In traceability we talk about Key Data Elements — the specific pieces of information that have to be recorded at each critical tracking event. Public health systems rely on the same principle, just with different fields. In each case, the discipline of recording the right information consistently is what makes the system work when you need it most.
The stakes look different on the surface. A gap in contact tracing data can change public health outcomes for entire communities. A gap in seafood traceability can mean the difference between a legal export and a shipment classed as Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU). Both, in their own way, are consequential — and both reward the organisations that built their digital capability before the moment of crisis arrived.
Fiji’s Position
When the pandemic reached Fiji, Traseable Solutions reached out to the Ministry of Health and Medical Services to offer support, expecting to find a need for digital tooling. What we discovered instead was that the Ministry had already invested in digital contact tracing systems and had them ready to deploy. That readiness is exactly the kind of investment that pays off when an emergency arrives — and it reinforces the case we’ve been making for years about the value of building digital infrastructure ahead of need rather than after it.
Pandemics and supply chains both reward preparation. The organisations that take data discipline seriously in calm times are the ones best placed to respond when conditions shift suddenly. That lesson belongs to public health and to agriculture and fisheries equally.