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Stopping COVID-19 before there is a vaccine means preventing sick people from spreading it. While outright blockades are one way to do this, South Korea and China have dramatically reduced infections in part by tracing contacts, the practice of tracing those with whom infected people have come into contact.
Tracking contacts is an ancient practice and a well-known part of the antivirus public health cocktail. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the CDC, it is generally made by hand. Interviewers talk to people who get sick, track their movements and interactions, and then call the people they’ve interacted with, creating a map of possible infections. MIT Technology Review estimates that if the US USA Do the traditional contact tracking by hand, we will need 100,000 workers to do it.
Digital contact tracking replaces at least some of those tech interviews. Especially in South Korea and China, it has been an effective way to reduce infections. (South Korea eventually dropped to zero local infections.) But successful approaches used elsewhere depend on a level of trust in authority and a waiver of privacy, which may not be acceptable in individualistic United States.
Apple and Google have just released APIs for contact tracking applications, which must now be developed by third parties and enabled by users. It is not known who will develop these applications in the US. USA And if there will be any coordination between the developers of the application to share data.
Several different approaches are being used.
Your mobile operator can track your location at any time, analyzing the connections of the cell tower. In South Korea, when someone is diagnosed with COVID-19, those tower hits are shared with local governments, who combine them with CCTV footage, credit card receipts, and interviews, and post the results online and through text messages.
In China, companies and public transportation systems have QR code scanners abroad, and everyone who enters must scan a QR code from an app on their phone. All of these motions go to a central government database, which finds out who has been around people who were sick.
In Taiwan, authorities remotely monitor anyone who is already under house quarantine, and the police receive an alert if the phone is turned off for more than 15 minutes.
The HaMagen app in Israel checks your phone’s GPS history against a central government database of anonymous GPS coordinates, which the health ministry built using more traditional contact tracking methods. If you have come across infected people, it alerts you, but does not directly alert the authorities.
Bluetooth-based contact tracking apps, like Singapore’s TraceTogether, rely on phones running the app in the background, searching for nearby Bluetooth devices that also run the app – this is how Apple’s AirDrop works. Phones can roughly determine the distance between them based on the strength of the Bluetooth signal; Recent iPhones can also use their U1 ultra-wideband chips to determine their proximity to each other. Unlike network and QR code-based solutions, Bluetooth-based apps drain your phone’s battery.
What a Bluetooth application does with your data depends on the developer of the individual application. TraceTogether stores a record of data that the government extracts and uses if a user is diagnosed with coronavirus, to find out who they are with.
Tracing contacts requires knowing who is sick. If it is not mandatory to use an application, people must choose. In Singapore, only 12 percent of people opted for the territory contact tracking app.
If it’s based on an app, people need devices running the app. 19% of Americans don’t have smartphones, according to Pew, which means they may not be able to run an app. If Apple and Google can’t share data, we have another problem: the US. USA They are divided almost equally between Android and iOS.
South Korea solves these problems by using text messaging and operator-based location tools that work with all phones. In China, everyone uses WeChat and Alipay, two “super apps” that run on almost every phone and that the government can order to be compatible.
Effective contact tracing can be much more invasive than most Americans are willing to accept. This Seoul Metro government website lists the movements of each person diagnosed with COVID-19 in the city. Although anonymized, it is probably possible for people to discover the identities of these people.
There are currently no contact tracking apps in the US. So there is no way of knowing if they are working or not. We hope the first ones will start appearing this month.
