Virus ‘tracing’ by smartphone: a key to reopening society?

WASHINGTON: Can an app contain the pandemic? Interest is growing in smartphone technology as a potential key to ending lockdowns and reopening economies around the world. Digital "contact tracing" would allow mobile systems to log instances where people have been in proximity with an infected person and send alerts where appropriate.

Researchers and health agencies around the world have been ramping up research on the potential solution, which could get a boost from a joint initiative by Google and Apple to make tracing more effective.

Here are some answers to the most common questions about tracing: Under the smartphone version of contact tracing, people would download mobile apps and update their COVID-19 status should they come down with the virus.

The apps would use a phone’s Bluetooth wireless signals to determine if a given user had crossed paths with an infected person. A number of research teams have been developing such systems, and at least one has been used in Singapore.

This could lead to "alerts" sent to anyone in close contact with a person who is infected, or who later confirms an infection, and allow those people at risk to self-quarantine. The Apple-Google collaboration could make this easier by allowing apps to cross over the two dominant mobile systems. The companies said that their technology could enable an app’s "digital key" to monitor contacts for a 14-day period.

A smartphone system could effectively replace the lengthy "manual" tracing by interview currently handled by medical staff, said Francesco Benedetti, a research scientist on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team working with more than 30 governments and health agencies on contact tracing.

"Doctors waste a lot of time in these interviews," Benedetti said. A digital system is more efficient because "it doesn’t rely on people’s memory, and it can determine contacts with people who don’t know each other." Researchers say digital tracing can be effective -- but only if significant numbers of people download the app and report symptoms.

Such a system "can achieve epidemic control if used by enough people," Oxford University researchers wrote in Science Magazine. Efforts are underway to study or implement contact tracing in France, Germany, Britain and elsewhere. In the United States, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden cited contact tracing as part of a plan "to safely reopen America" along with expanded testing and other steps.