Digital Contact Tracing for COVID-19: A Review of Its Application to the Global Pandemic

Literature Review Of Digital Contact Tracing Technologies

Early applications of digital contact tracing began in an area of the world where tuberculosis is more much of an issue for the population than the developed industrial world in the early 2010’s. The use of a digital contact tracing application for tuberculosis was successfully tested in Botswana and later utilized in other African countries. Unlike most of the industrialized world, the limiting factor in its implementation was the availability of 3G bandwidth at the time. This lack of bandwidth hindered the ability of the application to complete its centralized reporting mechanism thus defeating its main purpose. Digital contact tracing was also tested in Africa in Sierra Leone from 2014 to 2016 (Danquah, et al., 2019). Unfortunately, the central collection of data was inefficient or nonexistent in some cases due to technical and human issues. Overall, the application of the digital contact tracing was not considered a success for its application to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in this case.

As the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020 health departments and governments across the globe raced to find a technological approach to augmenting the traditional person-to-person method of contact tracing. Considering the near ubiquitous use of smartphones in virtually every country, tapping into this technological resource seemed to be the smartest move. The technology that developers have utilized for digital contact tracing is Bluetooth since it is included in every smartphone.

Smartphones equipped with Bluetooth could be used to track COVID-19 in the following manner: