One of the best tools we have to slow the spread of the coronavirus is, as you have no doubt heard by now, contact tracing. But what exactly is contact tracing, who does it and how, and do you need to worry about it?
In short, contact tracing helps prevent the spread of a virus by proactively finding people at higher risk than others due to potential exposure, notifying them if possible, and quarantining them if necessary. It’s a proven technique, and smartphones could help make it even more effective — but only if privacy and other concerns can be overcome.
Contact tracing, from memory to RAM
Contact tracing has been done in some form or another as long as the medical establishment has understood the nature of contagious diseases. When a person is diagnosed with an infectious disease, they are asked whom they have been in contact with over the previous weeks, both in order to determine who may have been infected by them and perhaps where they themselves were infected.
Until very recently, however, the process has relied heavily on the recall of people who are in a highly stressful situation and, until prompted, were probably not paying special attention to their movements and interactions.
This results in a list of contacts that is far from complete, though still very helpful. If those people can be contacted and their contacts likewise traced, a network of potential infections can be built up without a single swab or blood drop, and lives can be saved or important resources better allocated.
You might think that has all changed now what with modern technology and all, but in fact contact tracing being done at hospitals right now is almost all still of the memory-based kind — the same we might have used a hundred years ago.
It certainly seems as if the enormous digital surveillance apparatus that has been assembled around us over the