The COVID-19 pandemic and the draconian measures applied to limit its spread have accelerated the process of digitalizing many activities, including those within the health sector. In Morocco, a developing country in northern Africa, digital health has been deployed extensively, and in a remarkable way, to support the management of the current health crisis. Morocco is taking significant measures to become a key player in the process of achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) goal 3. The government has comprehensively integrated digital technology throughout its coordinated containment and mitigation processes. These processes encompass testing and diagnostics; virus genomic surveillance; telecare of suspected and chronic patients; COVID-19 patient contact tracing and tracking; a laboratory information system for medical material dispatching, biological sample collection, and data processing nationwide; and smart vaccination management. Moreover, the pace of amending legislation for enabling efficient telemedicine practice has been achieved at a record-breaking. The successful implementation of all of these digital health strategies testify to the effectiveness of digitalization for managing the health aspects of the pandemic and for the future development of health systems in Morocco and in the African continent, where digital health and telemedicine is set to become the cornerstone of medical practice.

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The comparison of genomic sequences plays a key role in determining the structural and functional relationships between genes. This comparison is carried out by identifying the similarities, differences and mutations between genomic sequences. This makes it possible to study and analyze the genetic and the evolutionary relationships between organisms. Alignment algorithms have been in the spotlight for the last few decades, due to a vast genomic data explosion. They have attracted a great deal of interest from many researchers who focus on the development of practical solutions to ensure effective alignments with an optimal response time. In this paper, a novel algorithm based on Discrete To Continuous "DTC" approach has been developed. The proposed methodology was compared against other existing methods, which are largely based on the concept of string matching. Experimental results show that the DTC algorithm delivers supremely efficient alignment with a reduced response time.

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