Improving contact-tracing apps in the COVID-19 era

(Image: Pixabay CC0) - An international collaboration with EPFL has developed a method to improve the performance of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps by taking into account a user's recent contacts, risk levels and shared information about tests and symptoms. Contact-tracing apps like SwissCovid have enormous potential to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Users allow the apps to track their contact with each other and estimate the chances that they might have come into contact with someone infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. If they have, the app issues a notification. Understandably, contact-tracing technology has raised a lot of ethical and privacy questions, all of which are weighed against the need to safeguard public health. Nonetheless, there has been comparably less effort in optimizing the performance and accuracy of contact-tracing apps, despite their great potential in addressing the pandemic. Now, a collaboration of scientists has developed a statistical method that can improve the performance of contact-tracing apps by taking into account a user's recent contacts, risk levels and shared information about tests and symptoms.