Do we need a contact tracing app?

COVID-19 Contact tracing Pandemic Privacy Proximity tracing

Journal

Computer communications
ISSN: 0140-3664
Titre abrégé: Comput Commun
Pays: England
ID NLM: 101570583

Informations de publication

Date de publication:
15 Jan 2021
Historique:
received: 18 05 2020
revised: 05 11 2020
accepted: 10 11 2020
pubmed: 26 11 2020
medline: 26 11 2020
entrez: 25 11 2020
Statut: ppublish

Résumé

The goal of this paper is to shed some light on the usefulness of a contact tracing smartphone app for the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. We review the basics of contact tracing during the spread of a virus, we contextualize the numbers to the case of COVID-19 and we analyze the state of the art for proximity detection using Bluetooth Low Energy. Our contribution is to assess if there is scientific evidence of the benefit of a contact tracing app in slowing down the spread of the virus using present technologies. Our conclusion is that such evidence is lacking, and we should re-think the introduction of such a privacy-invasive measure.

Identifiants

pubmed: 33235399
doi: 10.1016/j.comcom.2020.11.007
pii: S0140-3664(20)31987-3
pmc: PMC7676320
doi:

Types de publication

Journal Article

Langues

eng

Pagination

9-18

Informations de copyright

© 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Auteurs

Leonardo Maccari (L)

Department of Environmental Science, Informatics and Statistics, University of Venice, Italy.

Valeria Cagno (V)

Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine, University of Geneva Medical School, Switzerland.

Classifications MeSH