Digital contact tracing faces roadblocks

Technology companies are offering a new tool to countries and states trying to reopen their economies amid the coronavirus pandemic: digital contact tracing applications.

Touted as a way to track cases and isolate carriers quickly through the use of smartphones people already have in their pockets, the technological fix has gained significant attention from governments and private companies alike.

But it’s not clear how effective the alternative to traditional one-on-one interview-based contact tracing would be. And it also raises other issues dealing with surveillance.

Tech: Experts warn Bluetooth’s limited range and accuracy may result in false positives.

The technology might show a contact between someone carrying the disease and a second person who is on the other side of a porous wall, Ashkan Soltani, a former adviser to the U.S. chief technology officer, wrote on the Brookings Institute’s TechStream with University of Washington professors Ryan Calo and Carl Bergstrom.

The product lead of TraceTogether, Singapore’s digital contact tracing app, said traditional contact tracing is superior.

“If you ask me whether any Bluetooth contact tracing system deployed or under development, anywhere in the world, is ready to replace manual contact tracing, I will say without qualification that the answer is, no,” Jason Bay wrote in a blog post.

Buy-in: It’s also unclear whether people would be comfortable with digital contact tracing. Public polling data suggests that Americans are hesitant to download apps from tech companies that would theoretically track who they interact with.

Only 50 percent of Americans who have smartphones capable of running such applications say they would download them, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland survey conducted last month.

“I don’t know that it’s a solution that is really going to work for an American citizenry that is already pretty preoccupied about privacy,” Mike Reid, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco who is overseeing the city’s contact tracing efforts, told The Hill in an interview.

Deficits elsewhere: Experts also say that traditional contact tracing must be bolstered for digital contact tracing to be effective.

“Right now our focus needs to be scaling up tried and true person to person contact tracing systems that involve one human being contacting another,” Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Hill in an interview.

According to Johns Hopkins University, the U.S. needs 100,000 more public health staffers to make contact tracing effective.

Testing is another problem. Once individuals are notified of potential exposure, the next step in traditional contact tracing is getting a test.

“Long story short,” Reid, who has a background in tracing HIV cases, said, “you can’t do contact tracing unless you have enough testing capability to be able to test everybody that you identify.”