what is " contact tracing " really?

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Contact tracing has been done in some form or another as long as the medical establishment has understood the nature of contagious diseases. When a person is diagnosed with an infectious disease, they are asked whom they have been in contact with over the previous weeks, both in order to determine who may have been infected by them and perhaps where they themselves were infected. The type of contact tracing being tested and deployed around the world now uses Bluetooth signals very similar to the ones your phone already transmits and receives constantly. The difference is it just doesn’t automatically forget the other devices it comes into contact with. Countries like South Korea and New Zealand have aggressively used contact tracing in an attempt to control outbreaks. While researchers have worked for months to develop COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, contact-tracing apps like COVID Trace have been touted as one of the technology world’s most promising contributions to the fight against the pandemic. But seven months into the U.S. outbreak, such apps have made slow progress across the country, hampered by sluggish and uncoordinated development, distrust of technology companies, and inadequate advertising budgets and messaging campaigns. Whether it’s worth the investment, it’s really hard to answer that until there’s more information.

Can Bluetooth tech really get us back to some resemblance of a normal life? Bridget Carey explains the big challenges around contact tracing apps and what it will take for the apps to make a difference. Intrigued? read more about it here..

The purpose of contact tracing is to break chains of transmission, explains Crystal Watson, a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. It is a very well-used public health intervention which has been used for decades to track a variety of infections.

Rapid, accurate, timely contact tracing is critical to containing the COVID-19 pandemic, yet the process is time consuming and relies on a diagnosed person to recall everyone they may have come in contact with in the past two weeks. To augment this manual approach, an MIT team has developed an automated, smartphone-assisted approach that permits effective contact tracing while preserving privacy.

1. what do they do?

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2. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

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3. MIT LAB

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