What Exactly Is Contact Tracing? How Is WHO Helping?

World Health Organisation is in plans to launch an app by the end of this month to benefit countries that can’t build an app on its own. The app is expected to have features that will assess if the person has COVID-19 or not, and also consider a Bluetooth-based contact tracing feature, as told to Reuters. 

The app will give out personalised information based on the country about COVID-19 for the users. It will ask them about their symptoms that indicate COVID-19 and provide guidance on the same. While they will be launching the app on a global level, all governments can access it and add their own features onto it by using the app’s underlying technology. 

Bernardo Mariano, chief information officer at WHO, told Reuters that the value of this app is really for countries that do not have anything. We, as a world, would be leaving behind the ones that are not able to (provide an app), that have fragile health systems.

What are other countries doing?

Some countries like India, the United Kingdom and Australia have already developed their own contact tracing apps that also provide useful information such as quarantine centres, symptoms, precautions, etc. With WHO’s own app, it aims to provide countries with a tool that they may not be able to develop due to lack of resources, tech expertise and engineers. 

Countries are grappling with efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19 and while some districts are turning into green zones, as a whole country, there is only a rise in cases. For India, after the consecutive second extension of the lockdown, we are still recording the highest spike in cases in a day. Along with the lockdown, India has also been using technology in its full potential to fight the virus. 

India’s Aarogya Setu app is serving the purpose of tracing those that are affected and keeping safe those that aren’t. The app uses location tracking and Bluetooth to track home quarantined individuals and the movement of people. It also provides relevant information regarding cases around users’ areas, overall cases, symptoms, and precautionary information. 

What exactly is contact tracing and why is it needed? 

As the name suggests, it is the tracing of individuals that have been infected by an epidemic or pandemic. In recent times, countries are using this technology to track people that have been infected by the diseases and alert those uninfected about being close to infected persons.

Trained individuals collect data from infected persons about who they have been in contact with and then decide who has to be quarantined. Emailing or calling people to alert them is one way to contact trace. The newest way is to develop a mobile app that uses location tracking to understand where people may have come in contact with infected persons. 

The whole effort of this activity is aimed at containing the spread of the virus since there isn’t a successful treatment discovered for it yet. 

Contact tracing is definitely useful and especially when its use has begun at an early stage. For South Korea, tracing and testing began at an early stage which ensured they never needed to impose a lockdown. They used CCTV, mobile phone tracking, and monitored credit card transactions to identify people’s whereabouts. 

The two major drawbacks to contact tracing is that it is a lot of tedious work and there is a fair percentage of the population that does not own a smartphone. 

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