Smartphone contact-tracing technology has played a role in easing lockdown in China and other countries are following suit• But are contact-tracing apps all they're cracked up to be??? With Covid-19 showing no signs of slowing its spread across the globe public debate is moving on from how to stop the virus in its tracks to how we can adapt and live through this outbreak•
Societies have been enormously altered by the efforts to control the epidemic with long-lasting repercussions for the economy and for individuals•As a widely available vaccine for coronavirus is still more than a year away governments worldwide are considering ways to bring some semblance of normality back to the world a little sooner•
One option coming under close scrutiny is using mobile technology to trace people thought to have Covid-19 and those they may have passed the disease on to•
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Contact-tracing apps follow the movements of a person’s smartphone using technology such as Bluetooth low-energy sensors•The Bluetooth sensors in mobile phones would see when someone came within close proximity of anyone who reports that they have the symptoms of Covid-19 or who has tested positive for the virus•If a user spent more than a certain amount of time next to someone who thinks or knows they’re positivethey would be warned•
Another key benefit of the apps is that they could be a way to warn people retrospectively when they have had contact with someone who was asymptomatic or didn’t know they had Covid-19 at the time• It’s possible to do contact tracing the old-fashioned way through interviews with the patient•but this is time consuming laborious and relies on fallible human memory• Then there is the additional problem that a person won’t remember or know how to identify a stranger they passed in a shop• for example
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