Critic warns contact tracing could promote discrimination
“I think that’s pretty minimal invasion and I think a lot of Canadians would find that acceptable as a trade-off for being locked down and losing their job,” he said.
Contact tracing has long been one of the cornerstones of epidemic response. Typically, public-health workers seek to find out where a person infected by a disease has been, and whom they’ve been near, during the time they could have been contagious. Then they notify possible contacts, so those people can be tested and/or quarantined.
But as the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading rapidly, Canada and other countries urged most people to stay home, an unprecedented public-health response.
Some nations — notably South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore — managed to control their epidemics without such lockdowns, through aggressive quarantining, border controls and contact tracing.
(Singapore did recently adopt a stay-at-home policy as new cases spiked.)
Now, weeks into the lockdown, contact tracing is again getting attention here.
The federal government recently put out a call for COVID-19 volunteers, partly to augment the tracing effort. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said Tuesday that pursuing the practice more aggressively would be part of that province’s plan to eventually get life back to normal.
Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, urged public-health units last week to double-down on tracing, suggesting that doing so was like forest firefighters stamping out hot spots.
Kwong said he believes public-health agencies have been overwhelmed by the scope of the tracing task. He suggested to the Toronto health unit recently that it bring in medical students to help, as has already happened in Alberta. More than 20 are to start Thursday.
But he noted they will eventually have to return to their studies. And a paper last week in the journal Science came to a striking conclusion about such human efforts.
Given the speed with which the SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads, “traditional manual contact tracing procedures are not fast enough,” said the Oxford University health-data researchers. “Delays in these interventions make them ineffective at controlling the epidemic.”
Contact tracing through smartphone apps, however, could “play a critical role in avoiding or leaving lockdown,” the article argued. That said, there is so far little real-world evidence that they do, in fact, work as epidemic busters.
The main pioneer app is one launched in Singapore on March 20, called Trace Together. Once downloaded, it uses Bluetooth communication to detect interaction with another phone user who has tested positive for COVID-19, then issues instructions on what the contact should do.
Rotstein said he knows of three or four companies in Canada working on similar programs.
One is the Mila artificial-intelligence hub linked to the University of Montreal and McGill University. It should be ready to launch within weeks, but no government has committed to use it yet, said spokesman Vincent Martineau.
For COVID-19, LivNao modified a mental-health app it already sells to employers and insurance companies. It uses low-energy Bluetooth, a smartphone feature that’s usually turned on by default, and GPS to identify a close brush with someone who has tested positive.
A notice is then issued to the contact, urging them to self-isolate. They also have the option to identify themselves to local public-health officials, said Leung.
The app also allows the company to use anonymized data to make predictions of demand for medical services, he said, but the company’s server would not hold any identifiable information.
Still, such technology is fraught with the potential for privacy breaches and even discrimination against infected people, warns Brenda McPhail of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
Governments should ensure apps safeguard privacy and are actually useful before “jumping on this particular bandwagon,” she said, especially when the technology is being promoted by private-sector developers.
“Where some see economic collapse, others see economic opportunity,” said McPhail. “We need to guard very carefully in the area of public health and prevention against the potential for companies to try to profit from people’s fear.”