The rise of contact tracing apps
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2020
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Governments around the world are planning to roll out contact tracing apps to help contain the spread of coronavirus. But will they work? Ed Butler speaks to BBC technology reporter Chris Fox about the technology that underpins them, and to researcher Natalie Pang from the National University of Singapore about the experience of Singapore's TraceTogether app, launched last month. But conventional human contact tracing has been around for decades. UK contact tracer Karen Buckley describes the challenges of the job, and John Welch from the non-profit Partners in Health describes his experience of contact tracing amid the Ebola outbreak in Africa and argues that apps are no substitute for an army of dedicated human contact tracers.
(Photo: A man holds a smartphone showing a contact tracing app launched in Norway this month. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:06.4 | Today we ask, will governments force us to adopt technology in the fight against coronavirus? |
| 0:13.5 | Yes, you can go outdoors again. We will ease the lockdown on the condition that if you're stopped, you can prove that you're using this app. |
| 0:20.6 | Yes, the tech of contact tracing today. How much use will it be? |
| 0:24.9 | And the wider effort required to defeat the virus. |
| 0:27.7 | If we agree that the time, effort and dollars that it takes to get to the bottom of this includes contact tracing, |
| 0:37.2 | then the will of the people is there. |
| 0:39.7 | We've all got to do something to get to the bottom of this. |
| 0:43.2 | That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:49.3 | Around the world, governments are now trying to figure out how to reopen their economies |
| 0:54.1 | after weeks of lockdown. But how to reopen their economies after weeks of |
| 0:55.0 | lockdown. But how exactly do you stop the spread of coronavirus in such circumstances? |
| 1:00.7 | Most governments now seem convinced that at least part of the answer has to be something |
| 1:04.9 | called contact tracing, a fancy name for what is basically a pretty basic form of medical detective work. |
| 1:12.3 | Contact tracing is the effort to reach out to every single positive COVID patient, |
| 1:19.1 | collect the names and contact information of everyone that they've been around, |
| 1:24.3 | and then reaching out to those contacts to avoid any sort of silent transmission |
| 1:28.6 | of COVID in the community. |
| 1:30.5 | That's a man called John Welsh. |
| 1:32.3 | He's a director of partnerships and operations. |
| 1:35.1 | The organisation Partners in Health, which has been doing this kind of thing for years |
| 1:39.5 | with all kinds of diseases around the world. |
... |
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