The unprecedented collaboration on an interoperable infrastructure between Apple and Google -- which came together in two weeks and was announced last Friday -- has now set the stage for a robust, potentially global contact tracing system.
The idea of contact tracing is straightforward. When someone is infected with a disease, public health workers need to know who that person has had recent contact with to be able to locate, test and possibly isolate those contacts to stop the disease spreading even further.
For decades, this technique has required painstaking drudgery -- interviewing patients about their every move, calling airlines and managers of restaurants, examining hotel records -- to determine everyone that’s been exposed. This was the case in tracking the paths of HIV, Ebola and measles.
The challenge is that tracing each case typically takes many days. In Wuhan, China, more than 9,000 epidemiologists performed this task, working in teams of five, according to the WHO. According to the latest figures, there are about 83,000 cases of COVID-19 in China. In the US, there are currently tens of thousands of new known cases every day, meaning a similar effort might require tens if not hundreds of thousands of epidemiologists.
Right now, most of the US is under stay-at-home orders because we don’t know who’s infected and who isn’t; to be safe, we’re presuming that anybody could be.
This is where digital stalking comes in. All that detective work could happen in an instant, using a tracking app. Anyone who has ha ..
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