Slowing spread of COVID-19 with contact tracing apps

In response to these health crises, new digital approaches to disease surveillance have emerged, aimed at speeding up the transfer of epidemiological data and increasing countries’ preparedness for future outbreaks.

What is Nigeria using for contact tracing of COVID-19 patients? “Our Surveillance, Outbreak Response Management and Analysis System platform for digital surveillance is also used for contact tracing. With this, we have an integrated system to keep track of new cases and also identify and follow up with their contacts,” Director General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control , Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, told The Guardian.

SORMAS was designed to improve the efficiency and timeliness of disease control measures. The entry of a suspected or confirmed case by a health worker at any level of the system automatically triggers a series of actions to ensure that it is managed quickly and efficiently. This system also allows different actors in the national surveillance and response system to receive and share new information which is immediately accessible to all those who need to see it.

During the past two months, several research groups have developed privacy-minded protocols, including the TraceTogether team in Singapore, the Private Automated Contact Tracing group led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and the largely European consortium Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing .

Similarly, the state of Massachusetts has announced the launch of what it calls the “first contact tracing” call center with 1000 virtual assistants to call and trace contacts of COVID-19-positive persons. In Israel, the government is using GMS call detail records in addition to patient mobile phone position data to locate contacts and trace their movement patterns.

Singapore’s TraceTogether app was developed by the country’s health ministry and technology agency, and was released on March 20. Although groundbreaking, it exposed one glaring technical limitation to this general approach: because of the privacy measures imposed on Bluetooth function by Apple’s operating system, for the app to be useful, iPhones must remain unlocked all the time with the app open, a major inconvenience and a drain on the battery.

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