But What’s The Human Contract Tracer Process?

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

Figure 1

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.

Figure 2:

Figure 3:

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…