Contact tracing history is often inconclusive

IIn May 2020, when the epidemic was still recent and people were trying to use models to better understand what was going to happen, one could still dream. “Using a contact tracing app would be enough to stop the epidemic if enough people used it,” Oxford University scientists wrote at the time. in scienceAnd for a while he thought that this would certainly be true. It seemed very logical: Of course, the epidemic in the twenty-first century should be very different from the Spanish flu. Everyone will be informed of the risks in real time and will be able to rely on all relevant epidemiological information being collected and used quickly and transparently at the national level.

Today we are getting smarter, we know the German realities of fax machines and the chronic understaffing in the health system, at the same time we have been reminded that a lot of harm can be done through the digital transmission of personal data to supposedly bona fide companies.

But were the more technologically advanced countries really better off? Not all of this is clear. Here’s what scientists say about Eric Topol and Jay Pandit of American Scripps Research in a public article In “Nature Biotechnology”. In it, they pursue the question of what can be learned from more than two years of the pandemic about digital attempts to collect epidemiological data, testing and contact tracing. Answer: Not much. There are hardly any systematic evaluations.

A rare exception can be found in the UK. There it was determined at the end of 2020 that in 13 weeks nearly a million infections were prevented using the app. We don’t know if the same applies to RKI’s coronavirus warning app. After all, it has been downloaded 45 million times. She continues to send her warnings tirelessly. However, many people have given up trying to understand how the app really works after making several tweaks to the warning algorithm. Like answering a question about what to do with a red warning – apart from feeling generally happy because you’re clearly not the only one who is still using the app and dreaming of its usefulness.