But What’s The Human Contract Tracer Process?

But What’s The Human Contract Tracer Process?

With news items like this, you have to question a few things:

The main question, is that what will this App do, that a whole lot of human contact testers cannot do? Hellewell et al [1] have analysed how well contact tracing could be used to suppress the spread of COVID-19. For this they used they varied the reproduction number (R0), the delay from symptom to isolation, contract tracing probability, transmission before symptom offset, and the percentage of sub-clinical infections. Figure 2 shows the simulated model for infection. Figure 3 outlines that contact tracing above 60% is required to have a significant impact on reducing the infection rate.

I may be completely wrong, but I think that contract tracing could be a waste of time, especially in that few people will actually install it, and when they do install it, it may too late to trace their connections. To me, we need to properly define the process of contact tracing using humans to talk with those who have been shown to be infected. In this case Alice is infected, and this is confirmed by Faith (her GP). Faith contacts Carol and who does an interview, and uses permission links into social media engines to search for Alice’s contacts. In the end, Alice has a case record, and which is reviewed by her GP, who will advice Carol and how to proceed. Facebook and the other social media companies will never know that Alice has been infected, and all they are used for is to link a contact ID. As we do not have self-soveirgn identity, this approach provides an alterntative to link to IDs:

If you are interested in the NHSX App, I have outlined it here:

References

[1] J. Hellewell, S. Abbott, A. Gimma, N. I. Bosse, C. I. Jarvis, T. W.Russell, J. D. Munday, A. J. Kucharski, W. J. Edmunds, F. Sunet al.,“Feasibility of controlling covid-19 outbreaks by isolation of cases andcontacts,”The Lancet Global Health, 2020.