COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing between Privacy Issues and Co-Production – Why Some Have Worked and Some Haven’t

Abstract

With the first outbreak of COVID-19, governments in the world adopted various policies to contain its spread. Major policies are: social distancing; identify and isolate who diagnosed with COVID-19; contact tracing and quarantine them; mass testing and quarantine those who are positive; and lockdown. Among these methods, contact tracing is used for contagious diseases and was used during the Ebola virus outbreak, as well as in the SARS outbreak. As COVID-19 has gone global, some countries have aggressively used digital contact tracing in an attempt to control outbreaks and they have been successful.

When contact tracing is performed manually, it needs staff interviewing people who have been diagnosed with the disease to figure out who they may have recently been in contact with. Then, they have to contact and tell those people they may have been exposed. This procedure needs well trained staff and is time-consuming. Thus, with the outbreak of COVID-19, this method became unrealistic to perform, opening the way to develop digital contact tracing methods.

This paper analyses various types of digital contact tracing developed and used in different countries and tries to understand why some worked, while others haven’t, focusing on the issue of privacy and co-production, which are important issues in using new digital technology.