Contact tracing is the process of identifying, assessing, and managing people who have been exposed to a disease to prevent onward transmission. When systematically applied, contact tracing will break the chains of transmission of COVID-19 to prevent future waves or surges of cases, and to enable us to get back to work in a much safer way. Contact Tracing is an essential public health tool for controlling the virus.
Contact tracing for COVID-19 requires identifying people who may have been exposed to COVID-19 and following them up daily for 14 days from the last point of exposure.
The goal is to create a graph of corona-virus transmission, and trace the source nodes in order to isolate them. There can be multiple approaches to the problem, this is how my solution looks like
- A self-assessment and self-reporting based portable application, capable of running on multiple types of devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and laptops with real-time geolocation and Bluetooth based proximity tracing of other users, running the same application of their devices. Each user’s HealthStatus tokens are broadcasted within a 30 metres radius, and every user of the application in the proximity range will receive these tokens.
- If a sick user is nearby, all the users in the vicinity will get a threat alert. The total interaction time or visit time of a user will be recorded whenever he or she, meets or passes by, a sick person, or visits a place. If a user is not feeling and suspects that he or she might have been exposed to COVID-19, then there is a self-assessment option which contains a predefined set of questions, that can predict the likelihood of infection.
- If the assessment score bypasses the defined threshold, all users in the vicinity are notified of potential threat; Local health authority(LHA) is notified via the application. The LHA then prescribes a suitable COVID-19, and if the user tests positive, an incubation period of 14 days is initiated, which contains daily self-assessments, self-quarantining, and self-reporting of every place visited, every person in touch, and every notable interaction made within the past 14 days.
- Contact Tracing DB Github