096 - The Pros and Cons of Using Smartphones For COVID-19 Contact Tracing

Public Health On Call

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Medicine, News, Health & Fitness

4.6 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2020

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Can smartphones assist contact tracing, a public health tool critical to getting the pandemic under control? What's known as "digital contact tracing" has been utilized in other countries, but there are privacy, policy, and equity issues to be worked out before a US launch. Bioethicist Dr. Jeffrey Kahn talks with Stephanie Desmon about the potential and pitfalls of this technology.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
0:12.7	Our focus is the novel coronavirus.
0:15.2	I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, and also a former secretary of Maryland's health department.
0:21.6	Our goal with this podcast is to bring evidence and experts to help you understand today's
0:26.9	news about the novel coronavirus and what it means for tomorrow.
0:30.5	If you have questions, you can email them to public health question at jhh.edu.
0:36.3	That's public health question at jh.h. That's public health question at jh.h.u.edu for future podcast episodes.
0:42.8	Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Professor Jeffrey Khan, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins, who is the lead
0:48.8	author of a new report about the use of digital contact tracing using smartphones to help stem the spread of COVID-19.
0:56.0	They discuss the pros and cons and the privacy questions of using technology for this type of public health detective work.
1:04.0	Let's listen.
1:06.0	Jeff Kahn, thank you so much for joining me.
1:09.0	My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
1:14.1	So I'd like to start with a simple question.
1:20.2	If we could sort of define contact tracing in light of COVID and generally.
1:23.8	Sure. So it's what it sounds like.
1:30.2	It's identifying people who have been exposed. So you need to know who is infected to know who's been exposed. And then finding those who have been in contact with somebody
1:36.1	who's known to be infected, tracing them, and then all the people that they might have
1:42.3	exposed in the time that they have been infected.
1:45.2	So think of it as a web of infection and identifying those who are infected in the cases
1:52.6	and then those who they have infected and those who they have infected have infected and so
1:57.4	on.
	...

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