digital contact tracing

The old-fashioned way of tracing who an infected person has contacted over the period of time in which they might have passed on the disease is to ask that person to remember all the people that they have been within cooee of in the last week or so, get the details of those people and ring them to bring them in for testing.  The person who is the centre of this network of contacts can rarely remember exactly the people they met. Locating the ones that are remembered can be difficult.

 So the digital solution is an app on your phone that registers the presence of a similar app on another phone that is within its orbit for a period of 15 minutes.  This ‘contact’ is stored so that, if at a later date the first phone holder is diagnosed as positive for the disease, all the contacts of that phone can be hauled out of the database and contacted for testing.

 In the absence of any vaccine or treatment, being able to identify outbreaks of the disease and act quickly to prevent further spread is the best defence we have. There are privacy issues but these are being met as much as possible. The app gives contacts but not locations, for example. And the success of the digital contact tracing method is dependent on the number of people who download the app.