How to beat the Coronavirus?

The key of all countries that have been able to contain the virus (e.g. China, South Korea and Singapore) has been the same:

Detect the highest number of infected (or suspected to be infected) people and isolate them as fast as possible, before they spread the virus.

In some countries this has been done through automatic traceability and isolation monitoring tech tools and in other countries with armies of “detectives” that fulfill the same function of traceability and diagnosis.

Clearly, the key here is “speed”, and automatic tech tools can be much faster than any number of detectives: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/03/26/countries-are-using- apps-and-data-networks-to-keep-tabs-on-the-pandemic

An example of how a traceability and monitoring app works is as follows:

1. A person (e.g. a delivery-boy ) installs the app
2. After 7 days, the delivery-boy has symptoms and reports them through the app
3. The app knows exactly who were the “30” people with whom the delivery-boy had contact with in those 7 days (with a technology that uses the smartphone’s Bluetooth and GPS systems)
4. The app automatically informs these 30 people: that they are on risk, that they have to be more careful and that they will be put on mandatory monitored isolation
5. These 30 people are automatically monitored by their smartphone’s GPS, so that they really obey their mandatory isolation
6. One of these 30 people eventually also reports symptoms
7. The app also already knows all the people with whom this person had contact with, and so the process is repeated

In this way, we can trap the virus until it can’t spread any more!

In my opinion, the main world’s priority should be to help the World Health Organization (WHO) launch its global traceability app as soon as possible, and as soon as the app gets lauched, goverments should have everything ready to integrate the app into their systems and to launch awareness campaigns massively, so that everybody starts using the app: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/devices/who-official-coronavirus-app-waze-covid19

Finally, I would expect WHO’s app to integrate Singapore’s Bluetooth traceability technology, which will be launched for free and open sourced by their government:

• Video of how Singapore’s tracing app works: https://youtu.be/buj8ZTRtJes
• TraceTogether’s global availability: https://tracetogether.zendesk.com/hc/en-sg/articles/360045410073-Can-you-make-TraceTogether-available-to-other-countries
• BlueTrace’s global availability: https://bluetrace.io/

This is the only way to beat the virus (meanwhile we have vaccines). And the faster we react, the faster we will beat the virus and the less deaths we will have.

For those who still have doubts that the best solution is quick detection and selective isolation (even better than social distancing), you can see this incredible video of the simulations of the different possible measures that could be implemented: https://youtu.be/gxAaO2rsdIs

Article’s source: El Tiempo. Colombian Newspaper