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Do we need a contact tracing app?
Journal article

Do we need a contact tracing app?

  • Maccari L Department of Environmental Science, Informatics and Statistics, University of Venice, Italy.
  • Cagno V Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine, University of Geneva Medical School, Switzerland.
  • 2020-11-25
Published in:
  • Computer communications. - 2021
COVID-19
Contact tracing
Pandemic
Privacy
Proximity tracing
English 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.
Language
  • English
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/233005
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