Contact Tracing with Technology: Explainer

What technologies are available on your phone to help with contact tracing and why they are more limited than we hope

Photo by Mario Caruso on Unsplash

The fundamental problem to solve in learning to live with covid-19 is our ability to contact trace and then test people who may have come into contact with infected people. If you can target the people you should test or isolate effectively and then test them quickly then you gain the ability to minimise the disruption to daily life from the virus and reduce its spread. Without effective contact tracing you can’t have effective testing beyond your pool of key workers. Without the combination of the two your chances of safely emerging from lockdown are poor.

There are two main approaches for doing this:

1. Correlate locations of users using data available to Google and Apple. Both companies collect location information from users of their smartphones in order to improve their maps experiences. This has limitations around accuracy of data and how you go about collecting it safely and merging it. It involves centrally collecting location information.
2. Proximity with the devices of other people. When someone is infected (or in some cases shows symptoms) people who had been in close contact with that person are contacted. The UK government is building an app using Bluetooth to detect when…