COVID-19 Contact Tracing: Current States and Future Directions

Contact tracing has become a key tool for public health officials to effectively combat the spread of new diseases, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Currently, this process is either manual or semi-manual and often very time consuming and inefficient. It largely relies of human memory and cannot be scalable to tackle pandemic like COVID-19. Researchers and practitioners around the world have turned into the technology based approaches to provide a scalable solution. Smartphone and associated digital technologies have the potential to provide a better solution due to its high level of penetration coupled with mobility. However, information like location or proximity associated with other personal data are very sensitive private information and can be used by the states to do…