Opinion | Coronavirus crisis highlights the need for governments and tech sector to prepare for the next pandemic

Name: Fears of fresh Covid-19 outbreak in Hong Kong after 6 cases reported connected to a building
Uploaded: 2020-06-07T05:30:17.000Z
Duration: 3 min 41 s
Description: Fears of fresh Covid-19 outbreak in Hong Kong after 6 cases reported connected to a building

Testing and tracing efforts must strike a balance between gathering useful information and ensuring data cannot be used for nefarious purposes

Data can be a powerful ally in keeping future outbreaks under control, but the cure must not be worse than the disease

Reading Time:4 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

A Swiss soldier at the Chamblon barracks holds up a mobile device with the contact tracking application created by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, using Bluetooth and a design called Decentralised Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing. Legislatures across Europe have debated how centralised their contact-tracing apps should be and how best to ensure data security. Photo: Reuters

Michael Chertoff

Published: 1:30pm, 7 Jun 2020Updated: 6:00pm, 7 Jun 2020

As we confront the first global pandemic of the century, we are learning a critical lesson. Infection control depends on early detection of contagious individuals and warning their contacts they need to get tested themselves and, if positive, to go into quarantine. This approach of testing and contact tracing is currently the only method to stem rising transmission rates before community transmission becomes widespread.

The challenge of contact tracing is scalability. First, there must be sufficient testing and diagnosis to detect infected people quickly. More challenging is finding and reaching those who have interacted with the virus carrier. If someone has been infectious for days, they may have closely interacted with many people. Remembering, identifying, finding and contacting them is highly labour-intensive.

Not surprisingly, public health experts and government authorities are looking to the tech community to help provide a scalable solution to testing and contact tracing. Moreover, collection of this sort of data, as well as other information, can give experts a more comprehensive, real-time picture of the ebb and flow of infection and the location of emerging hotspots.

Several firms and governments are developing possible solutions, many of which use Bluetooth connectivity so they can identify all mobile devices that came within range of an individual. If a person is found to be infectious, all devices within Bluetooth range during the relevant period would receive a warning, provided their devices were running appropriate software.

This contact-tracing tool would protect personal privacy in several ways. First, participants in this plan would have to download the app, thereby opting into the programme. Second, when a warning goes to close contacts, it would travel point-to-point without transiting through a central database. Therefore, this would be a radically decentralised system.

03:41

Fears of fresh Covid-19 outbreak in Hong Kong after 6 cases reported connected to a building

Third, those receiving a warning would not receive the identity of the virus carrier, but simply learn they had been in close contact with someone who was infectious. This approach is relatively privacy-protective in that ideally it would keep no record of who was infected or exposed. It is also entirely consent-based. Users must download the app and, if they test positive, be willing to launch the alert from their own devices.

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x