Every time I leave my house, to go to the grocery store, or run some other errand, or to go hiking, I wonder if I am putting myself at risk of contracting COVID-19. A paranoia that is a familiar feeling to most people living through these unprecedented times. Which begs the question: how much risk am I actually encountering as I move through society? Am I in an area that is a totally free and clear of the virus. Or did someone with it just pass through increasing the likelihood that I may have contracted it?
Of course it’s hard to say for sure. A lot of people with the virus are asymptomatic and don’t even realize that they have it. Making it easier to go undetected. But at the same time there are probably steps that we could be taking to track it, to let people know where the virus has been and how it’s being spread. To let people know, in real time, what their current environment looks like. Steps that could better protect them in the long run.
A technological solution would be nice and with that in mind several app developers have bandied about ideas for location tracking apps that would use GPS to follow people/the virus around like a medical Marauder Map of sorts. Such as the MIT Media Lab’s Private Kit: Safe Paths. But this concept really only works if enough people download the app and enable the tracking software. Something that people may be hesitant to do in today’s day and age of abundant privacy concerns.
As Technology Review puts it, “The World Health Organization has called for aggressive measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus. These require not only identifying and isolating infected individuals but also identifying people they have been in contact with and where they have been, so that those people can be tested and the locations disinfected. In some countries, such as China, this data has been pulled from people’s phones and processed by the government. But this kind of government surveillance would be a hard sell in more democratic countries like the US or UK.”
Which is why it’s good that there’s a better solution in the works. One that isn’t so Orwellian but still accomplishes the same goal. One that simply relies on users reporting their own coronavirus related symptoms, or any symptoms whatsoever, or even the fact that they aren’t experiencing any at all at the moment, into an app in a crowd sourced attempt at tracking the spread of COVID-19 and any future localized outbreaks.
According to The Independent, “Researchers hope to use that data to help slow the outbreak by learning how fast the virus spreads, where the highest-risk areas are, and who is most at risk. Tracking symptoms will also help researchers better understand how the symptoms of COVID-19 are linked to underlying health conditions…”
But that’s not all.
They add that, “The app – currently only available in the UK, but launching in the US on Thursday – could help answer important questions about the disease such as why some people develop severe and fatal symptoms while others only experience relatively mild ones. It may also help doctors distinguish between the very similar symptoms of Covid-19 infection and seasonal coughs or colds, and to make it easier for people to better understand what is making them unwell.”
Considering how hard it was and still is to get tested we may never know the true extent of this global pandemic so at the very least apps like this or Covid Near You could help fill in some of the knowledge gaps, enabling researchers to determine, based on the quantity and severity of symptoms reported, if there were any unreported cases and just how widespread these outbreaks truly were. Information that could be truly priceless in stopping this outbreak or preventing the next one.
Are apps that track the spread of COVID-19 the Greatest Idea Ever?
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