Covid-19 spreads too fast for traditional contact tracing. New digital tools could help

Every strategy for releasing Covid-19’s vise-grip on daily life starts with identifying cases and tracing their contacts — the laborious task of public health workers tracking down people who have crossed paths with a newly diagnosed patient, so they can be quarantined well before they show symptoms.

That typically takes three days per new case, an insurmountable hurdle in the U.S., with its low numbers of public health workers and tens of thousands of new cases every day. Existing digital tools, however, using cellphone location data and an app for self-reporting positive test results, could make the impossible possible, the authors of a new analysis argue.

“Traditional manual contact tracing procedures are not fast enough for [the new coronavirus],” researchers at the University of Oxford write in in the journal Science this week. But digital technology “can make contact tracing and notification instantaneous.”