I don’t know about you, but I have already forgotten about the existence of a contact tracing system for people infected with COVID-19 from Apple and Google. Even though the beginning of last year its launch and development have been almost the main topic on a par with the release of the new iPhone, iPad and Mac, over time, interest in it has somehow grown confused. Obviously, users just realized that this is some not very useful contraption, which is needed instead of creating active resistance to infection on the part of the two largest corporations. But apparently, those who thought so were wrong because the COVID-19 tracker really saves lives.
Researchers at the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Oxford have calculated that the contact tracing system actually works. The roughest estimates have already prevented more than half a million infections in the UK alone. It is easy to calculate how many potential lives the system saved, forcing users to quarantine and stop the disease’s further spread.
Why monitor COVID-19 patients?
Scientists analyzed the overall involvement in the use of the country’s service, which was the developer of the tracking application, calculated the potential indicators of infectiousness, mortality and the rate of spread of the disease. As a result, they came to some pretty surprising conclusions. In numbers, it looks like this:
- 21 million people over 16 in the UK use contact tracking;
- 1.7 million people received a notification to observe self-isolation due to contact with infected COVID-19;
- 600 thousand people did not become infected with COVID-19 because they waited out the incubation period at home;
- 6 thousand people survived, assuming that the death rate from COVID-19 is at least 1%.
The NHS Covid-19 app (as the UK contact tracing app is called) is an important tool in countering the pandemic. We know that since its launch in September last year, it has managed to alert hundreds of thousands of people at risk to self-isolate. Among them was myself. As a result, we managed to prevent about 600 thousand cases of infection, – said the Minister of Health of Great Britain Matt Hancock.
It may seem that 600 thousand from 21 million is an insignificant figure. However, you need to understand that in this case, we are talking about human lives. If Apple managed to save even 600 people from the disease and save the lives of at least 6 of them, then developing a contact tracing system would already make sense. Now imagine how many lives have been saved and how many people the service has saved from infections worldwide. Obviously, the bill goes into the millions.
The tracking system would work better if it alerted users to large crowds in advance, rather than after the fact.
However, Apple could make its system even more effective if it did not notify about contacts with infected people after the fact, but recommended in advance not to visit crowded places. They could be tracked impersonally using the same application. I think Apple would implement such a technology in which anonymous data is collected in one database, and then distributed among users depending on where they went.
It might look something like this:
- Let’s say I went to a mall or a market;
- The system determines where I am and the people closest to me;
- If there are a lot of people, a red zone is formed in that place on the map, if there are few – a green one;
- To do this, it is unnecessary to mark each user with dots, and you can colour the area of their stay.
There is nothing supernatural about this. For example, Google has long offered Google Maps users a breakdown of the regions where COVID-19 is most infectious. True, the search giant proceeds from information about the number of people actually sick, without recording users’ presence in certain places. However, in itself, such an undertaking may be useful to someone. Therefore, I think there will be no significant difficulties to start also identifying people’s mass gatherings.