The purpose of the corona virus detection apps was to save us

With very little evidence to show how effective such apps are and to address growing privacy concerns, they run the risk of doing more harm than good.
When You are in the queue for the supermarket in January 2021. Socially two meters away from those around you - and the phone in your pocket resonates with a notification from a contact tracing app installed six months ago, will become routinely familiar. However, you have already gone through this process several times.

Someone crossed the line with you last week - the app doesn't tell you - who - tested positive for the corona virus. It tells you to go straight home. You should isolate yourself until the test is complete. The test, like the ones before, was automatically ordered from the Public Health Center as soon as the notification was sent to your phone.

This is our new routine. Contact detection apps aren't here for a while. Apps will still keep an eye on us after the first waves of the corona virus have passed and public inquiries about the government's response have begun. At their current pace, they will become an integral part of our daily lives. And that will continue until the corona virus vaccine arrives.


Officials believe that this technology will save us. Connectivity apps have embraced the idea of ​​politicians finding ways to ease lock downs and restart failed economies. He hopes world leaders will find an answer to the difficult question of when the lock down will end. They promise to return as usual.

From Iceland to Israel, governments and health authorities have developed more than 30 systems. They promise to automate the laborious process of tracking the contacts of infected people, helping to reduce the spread of corona virus through the population and save lives.

Encouraged by China, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, they have all used elements of digital tracing technology, and there is a lot of reliance on contact detection apps. But there is little concrete evidence that they have any measurable effect. However, tracing apps can help in more efficient and complex operations performed by human contact detectors. At worst, the technology could prove useless, violate basic human rights, and initiate unprecedented large-scale surveillance. It seems that most of the hype surrounding communication tracing apps report storytelling rather than rigorous science.

"This is brand new land," explains Carda Kund, director of the Ada Lolis Institute, who has explored how the technology can be used to reduce corona virus lock down. "This is the first major epidemic or epidemic disease where apps that detect this type of agreement are being considered. There is not much evidence to support permanent benefits."

But we know that manual contact detection can be self-explanatory. Singapore, a technically advanced but authoritarian state, was one of the first countries to introduce a contact tracing app. It could initially control the spread of the virus. Many of the conclusions reached are incorrect: the contact tracing app had no effect.

Even more important was to track human-led contacts. Teams of people, including police officers, prepared to assist in the effort, conducting interviews with people who had contracted the corona virus. He asked where he had been for the past 14 days, who had spoken to him, and trawled through CCTV footage to track his movements. Once the investigation was completed and the individuals were identified, they checked to see if people who were in close contact with the infected person were sick or showing any signs of corona virus.

Dale Fisher, a professor of infectious diseases at the National University of Singapore, says: "The country's response to the corona virus. He added that contact tracking was a technique widely used by the Singaporean authorities in the package. The country has also isolated its positive aspects - this work world A lot of other people around didn't do it - and have a hard time enforcing it.