Digital Contact Tracing: Helping Flatten the COVID-19 Curve

With the coronavirus pandemic still affecting most countries globally, researchers advocate for the use of digital contact tracing as a means to reduce the spread of the virus.

Private Kit: Safe Paths, is an app developed by the MIT Media Lab with Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the lead. This app boasts of being able to perform digital contact tracing while protecting the privacy of persons. It has been speculated that the app might be integrated with Waze for COVID-19, an official WHO app that is also new to the market.

Below, we discuss the benefits and disadvantages of contact tracing.

Digital contact tracing is the tracing back of the steps/routes that an infected person (now patient) used by utilizing tracking systems, in a bid to locate every person the individual might have been in contact with in a period of two weeks.

By using this GPS-based location app, any individual who is confirmed as having been infected with the virus with a test done by a healthcare worker then shares their GPS information with the app’s server. This provides a location sequence that shows every location that the person visited in the last 2 weeks, without disclosing the person’s real identity. Other persons who use the application can then cross-check those trails with their own to check whether there was a significant overlap that may have made them susceptible to getting infected. They, however, do not have to share their data.

However, this does not mean that the app is 100% effective, especially if you factor in asymptomatic individuals or those whose symptoms are manageable and do not require hospital care.

To safeguard the privacy of those who use the app, infected persons have the option of blurring or redacting sensitive areas that might give their identity away. For uninfected individuals, their data isn’t uploaded to the server so that at the end of the day, only the user knows whether they may have come into contact with an infected person. The apps’ encryption methods provide both privacy and utility to the user as it’s been constructed in a way that doesn’t allow retracing or reconstruction of the data. That way not even the persons’ who created the application have access to the data that is uploaded by the user.

However, there are disadvantages to this method as well.

For instance, governments that have information on the GPS location paths of the application’s users create a monitoring state in which an individual may be hunted down if they are infected. Additionally, some countries have publicly shared this information, with exact GPS locations of the infected person, which leads to public exposing and shaming of the individual.

In countries like South Korea, groups have been formed on various social media platforms using the contact tracing data. This would lead to ‘investigations’ that would result in shaming or gossiping about an infected person. Sometimes, very private details about a person would get discovered which invaded the subjects’ privacy grossly.

Furthermore, in China, a color code with the colors green, yellow or red, are used to inform a person if they’ve been in proximity with a person who is infected. People who received red codes were shamed and it got to a point where only people with green codes could utilize government amenities or even visit the grocery.

All things considered though, digital tracing is still doing a good job of keeping more infections at bay while protecting the privacy of the patients thus helping flatten the curve. How will companies like Predictive Oncology (NASDAQ: POAI) fix the shortcomings of digital contract tracing while enhancing its benefits?

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