Coronavirus: Would you support a contact tracing app in Australia to fight COVID-19 spreading?

There is an instance where I might support a COVID-19 contact tracing app on my phone.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian speaks to the media in Sydney. She revealed that more than a quarter of the state's coronavirus cases are in people under 29. Picture: AAP.

There is an instance where I might support a COVID-19 contact tracing app on my phone.

Sure, we are often horrified about how smartphones track our every movement, glean our personal information and collate our consumer transactions to learn about our spending habits and sell it to third parties.

Concern about privacy is rightly at the forefront of people’s minds when considering installing a specialist app on our phones to trace the spread of coronavirus, and our possible personal scrapes with it.

READ MORE: Governments look to surveillance apps | Google profiles pandemic by tracing people’s movements

Some tracing apps overseas have proved effective while ignoring privacy concerns. At times they have bordered on a new age version of a leper carrying around their bell as happened centuries ago.

In China, an app collects the movements of those with coronavirus and records data to a centralised database. A South Korean app allowed the public to see where a particular virus sufferer went anonymously, however users glean their movements to less salubrious areas and activities. They became the subject of gossip.

Nevertheless, tracing apps of some form are being used and/or are being developed in Europe, Central America, India, the Middle East, eastern Europe, Africa, the US and UK.

Europe has formed the Pan-European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing initiative to develop apps that both seek to preserve privacy and offer tracing and support across the continent.

Is there a middle road and a reason for Australia to go down this road?

I can think of one big one. In Australia, we’re starting to debate how we could manage coronavirus not just now, but once we get it under control – life at “the other side” of the pandemic, as the Prime Minister calls it.

How long will we be in lockdown? How long will we need social distancing? Can we live reasonably freely without being immune to coronavirus before a vaccine is available?

We’re also revisiting the issue of herd immunity – whether it is possible to allow some sections of the public to be infected and gain immunity to COVID-19 to reduce its spread. That carries the risk of more Australians dying from COVID-19, in the quest to get the economy moving.

However, technology could help to reduce the risk of a fresh outbreak as we head towards “the other side” and reach it.

Health officials seek to put out emerging pandemic bush fires by contact tracing. This involves having coronavirus sufferers reveal their movements during their infectious period and health officials. Contacts of that person are asked to get a test and isolate.

This can be a tedious process, but technology might help speed it up without any mass collection of data. An app could log a person’s location and contact information on the phone but NOT send it to the cloud.

The app would log entries of other app users they come into close contact with, and when and where, using Bluetooth and an unidentifiable code for each user.

Bluetooth can detect other people beyond social distancing distance and the app could limit what is logged to a specified distance.

Suppose someone tests positive to coronavirus. Hopefully, they might agree to hand over their data to health workers. Health workers could then identify and contact people the coronavirus victim had been in contact with at the time of infection.

The original sufferer who tested positive would not have their name or movements published in the public domain.

In addition, this person’s contact history could be examined further back to trace who they were in contact with at their time of infection. By examining data from a group of people testing positive, a computer might detect possible common sources of an infection outbreak quite quickly.

This approach would also help deal with spot outbreaks going beyond the worst part of the pandemic.

Data collected on the phones of people who aren’t infected is never shared. The app could automatically purge this after an agreed time, for example 30 days or 60 days, depending on how far back health offices go when tracing common contacts. That data would cease to exist, having never been sent to the cloud.

Of course, this supposes smartphone manufacturers and their operating systems play ball, and ensure these apps run in a secure phone environment and cannot be hacked. All of this might sound a big ask, even pie in the sky, but quickly identifying spot breakouts through testing and an app like this might help us snuff out any resurgence quickly.

You’d need the majority of people to carry this app on their phone for this to be effective, but it would mean faster feedback to you if a contact had the virus. That’s an incentive. It also could mean more finetuned targeting of COVID-19 testing.

There are apps that have headed in this direction. There’s Singapore’s TraceTogether app for contact tracing, which last month was reported to be under consideration by the federal government, and Private Kit developed by MIT and its partners in the US that lets you log your location without sharing it in the cloud.

An Australian app version might let health workers double check exactly who gets notified about being in contact with a sufferer, rather than leaving this to an algorithm. Using the computation ability of computers and leaving cloud storage out on this occasion may work if we’re going to benefit from digital tracing.

Another area is symptom reporting. Currently health workers don’t know in real time where people are experiencing coronavirus or flu symptoms. Symptoms aren’t reported unless they are bad enough to warrant contacting a doctor or having a test. An app that reports symptoms and location might help pinpoint where both flu and COVID-19 outbreaks are happening and distinguish between them.

Germany is using the app Corona-Datenspendein (Corona Data Donation) that among other things records the vital signs of users, as does the Stop Corona app by GIS Cloud Developers which uses heat map analysis based on daily user health reports to pinpoint likely virus hot spots.

The Pan-European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing initiative is reported to be readying a contract tracing app for use across Europe.