If you are following the news, you may have heard about Contact Tracing and how it can help us contain communicable diseases such as COVID-19. Essentially, contact tracing is the process of manually identifying and closely monitoring those in close contact with people that have been diagnosed with an infectious disease. It is commonly performed for diseases such as tuberculosis and measles and it can help by:
- Breaking transmission chains
- Notifying contacts of a potential infection
- Enabling early testing and treatment of vulnerable contacts
However, the large volumes of COVID-19 cases and the speed at which the disease spreads make it difficult to perform accurate and timely contact tracing manually. Imagine trying to remember everyone you came into close contact with yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. What if it was somewhere public, and you don’t know their name or contact information? Besides being laborious and expensive, the whole process is too slow and therefore less effective at breaking transmission chains.
This is why you may have also heard about Automated Contact Tracing. This is the process of deriving a list of potential contacts using a mobile application, and it could potentially help by enabling a faster and more accurate system when compared to manual contact tracing. To illustrate this, we’ve put together a small simulation, which you can explore here.