Contact tracing: Can ‘Big tech’ come to the rescue, and if so, at what cost?
Pratik Sinha, Alastair Paterson · EClinicalMedicine · 2020
COVID-19 has resulted in a unique amalgamative failure of economics, healthcare, and society. Without an effective vaccine, the precise mechanism to resuming “normal” activity remains unknown. Public health consensus seems to align on the need to test, trace and isolate infected individuals with a stepwise repeal of lock-down measures. The infrastructure for contact-tracing, however, are woefully underdeveloped worldwide. In the US, it is estimated that 180,000 contact-tracers would be required and only 0.5% of that number currently exist [1].