The tech giants – Apple and Google – could be rivals but as per the latest buzz, they have come together to create technology to support the health officials to find out who has been infected by the deadly virus COVID 19. They are now building up apps for their respective operating systems – iOS and Android, which power a huge chunk of the world’s smartphones. They have teamed up together with a digital contract helping out to find out a technology, which is being closely watched to find out how the schools and businesses would reopen once the coronavirus epidemic goes down.
This can be called as a digital version of the traditional contract tracing, which is a labour intensive procedure which the public health officials would contact everyone who would get exposed to someone who is infected by the virus for informing out the self isolate or get tested. For instance, contact tracing can be called as a big portion of mitigation efforts in terms of Taiwan and Hong Kong. The digital contract between the two tech giants seems to be making things possible for automating the process in a big way thus giving the public health authorities the capability to tell when the people are seen coming close to each other with the help of the signals checked up with their smartphones.
These tools would be coming from the Android and iOS operating systems by the next month. The companies are stressing on the idea of privacy claiming that the tools will not find out any specific individuals but would also make it possible for public health officials to contact people who might be exposed. The officials from the US claim that they are massively expanding contact tracing that remains the key step in order making things safe for the government all over the world and thus help the gatherings and for the people to return to work. The CDC Director Robert Redford then told NPC in April that contact tracing is taking things very much aggressively, which would be needed for the US to get back to normal.
With the control measures one can get along in the right public health measures in the right place which include things in a big capacity for contact tracing – WHO director Dr.Tedros Ghebreyesus claimed this week. However, with the digital contact tracing is not a magic bullet and there are a whole lot of steps that would be required to before signing up the contact tracing apps, which seems to start slow along with spreading the COVID 19 all over the world. The key aspects of these tools powered by the tech giants’ collaboration include building up the apps with the help of public health groups. This will follow the other element – Testing needs to be more widely available, People have to trust the technology, and It can’t totally replace manual contact tracing. The two companies seemed to have done a historically contact tracing from the STDs over the infectious ailments before the COVID 19 came into the picture.