As COVID-19 continues to spread around the globe,
one tactic in particular, called contact tracing,
has been highly effective in countries
like Taiwan, Singapore, and Iceland.
But there is a trade-off.
Contact tracing asks us all to share data
with the government and corporations,
information that some people prefer to keep private.
So the question becomes:
How much privacy would you be willing
to trade to save lives?
The specifics of contact tracing vary by country,
but the basics remain the same.
Step one: identify and isolate
confirmed cases of COVID-19.
Step two: trace their movement
and contact with others backwards,
finding people who may be at risk without knowing it.
Step three: quarantine and track
the movements of confirmed cases going forward.
Syra Madad: It's a very lengthy process
that requires many different steps,
but at the end what you're trying to achieve
is to break that chain of transmission,
so that way you don't have new outbreaks,
if you will, or new cases of the disease itself.
Narrator: Rather than spending time treating new cases,
contact tracing allows officials to stop
the spread of the virus in the first place.
That's how countries that have implemented contact tracing
have been able to flatten the curve.
This requires a lot of manpower.
It also requires a monumental amount of data,
which is where the issue of privacy comes into play.
To make contact tracing truly effective,
it is important to have verifiable records
of people's whereabouts and contact with others.
Some countries have developed apps
that trace your cellphone's GPS signal,
thus keeping a log of every place you've been.
To many, that might sound like
the start of a dystopian horror movie:
the government tracking your every move
and knowing everyone you speak with.
On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic
seems straight out of a horror film itself,
and the results of contact tracing speak for themselves.
Take Singapore for example.
The number of confirmed cases in the country
is around 4,500 as of April 16,
despite being relatively near China,
the country where experts believe the virus originated.
Singapore was aggressive in adopting contact tracing.
The country utilized the national health service,
police detectives, and a contact-tracing app
to track the spread of the virus.
Their contact-tracing program was so effective
that about 40% of people in the first wave
of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country
discovered that they had been exposed to the virus
when they received a phone call
from Singapore's Ministry of Health.
The call informed them of when, where, and how
they came into contact with the virus
and told them to be tested and isolated.
Meanwhile, in the United States,
government authorities have not yet
aggressively pursued contact tracing as a tactic
to help prevent the spread of COVID-19,
despite the fact that there are now
more confirmed cases in the US
than any other country in the world.
We saw this play out in New York City,
where the first confirmed case of the novel coronavirus
was diagnosed on March 1.
Just a week prior, the woman who tested positive
had returned to New York from Doha, Qatar,
landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Public officials promised to track down every person
who had been aboard her flight
to identify other potential cases.
But according to The New York Times,
that never happened.
A lack of available tests
and the uniquely dense population of New York City
also contributed to the rapid spread of the virus
in the city and the state,
where more than 240,000 cases have now been reported.
And while New York did engage
in contact tracing to an extent,
it was nowhere near as vigorous as in countries
where the practice has been highly effective.
Madad: China, for example, implemented a huge workforce,
and they were able to do tens of thousands
of contact tracing every single day.
We do not have that infrastructure
here in the United States yet.
Another thing to note is that they were
just doing in a very small area of China.
We would need to do it throughout the United States
because we are having hot spots
throughout the United States.
Narrator: In New York City, where the population
is over 8.3 million, 50 disease detectives
were deployed to trace the spread of the virus
in the early days of the outbreak.
That's only one disease detective
for every 166,000 people.
Wuhan, China, where the crisis
is thought to have originated,
has a slightly higher population.
There, more than 9,000 disease detectives
were deployed to trace known cases.
This disparity is not unique to New York, however.
In the United States, only about
3,600 disease detectives have been trained
by the Epidemic Intelligence Service program since 1951.
That's for a population of over 329 million people.
While manual contact tracing is important, data helps.
Singapore has released an app that
not only tracks users' location,
but also uses Bluetooth to record proximity
to others who are using the app.
And though manual contact tracing may not be
as robust in the United States,
data collection certainly is.
Citizens' movements are on full display
via Silicon Valley companies big and small.
Lesser-known entities like Cuebiq and Unacast
have already been providing tracking data to the public.
And while Unacast collects its data via an opt-in app,
Cuebiq says only that it relies on
"Cuebiq's first party data" to create its interactive map.
So, with the technology and data for contact tracing
readily available, the question remains,
why was the US so slow to adopt
contact tracing on a wider scale?
The answer may be our own rights to privacy
and how dearly we hold them.
Americans' attitudes about their private data
being shared are well documented.
Wiretapping phones of American citizens
was a hot-button political issue
in the not-so-distant past.
And, more recently, large corporations mining us for data
has come to the forefront of the national consciousness.
Those attitudes may shift as the COVID-19 crisis continues.
Madad: So, in order for us to get
to a post-coronavirus-disease era
where we're able to lift some of
these social-distancing restrictions
and, you know, for all intents and purposes,
resume whatever our normal lives would look like,
we need to make sure we're able
to implement rigorous contact tracing
to be able to isolate those individuals
and quarantine individuals
that may have the disease itself.
Narrator: While a recent poll showed that
a majority of Americans agree that measures
like closing schools and businesses
are necessary to combat the coronavirus,
they also share a desire to return
the day-to-day operations of the country
to as close to normal as possible
as soon and as safely as possible.
At the same time, health experts predict
a second wave of the virus to hit
sometime in 2020 or 2021.
So offering up our location information
might be the best way to get through this.
Madad: Safeguarding privacy is something that
is going to be a huge roadblock.
But, at the same time, I think that
we're living in a very technology-savvy society
where we should be able to,
with some degree, you know, work around that.
I think we can have this even as a voluntary basis.
Being able to consent, in a way,
in letting them know this is obviously what's great
not just for them, but for the greater community
if we wanna resume our normal life,
whatever that's, again, gonna look like,
you know, this is something that needs to be done.
Narrator: The tech world has already
started to publicly collect this data.
Facebook's Data for Good program has created data maps
that show distributions of people reporting COVID symptoms,
density of at-risk populations,
areas that are socially connected
to current hot spots, and more.
Apple and Google have announced plans for a joint venture
to create an opt-in contact-tracing app
that would be compatible with both Apple and Android phones.
But with this push for more government access
to location-tracking data also comes
another push for more user protection.
As of now, there are no comprehensive federal laws
around data privacy in the United States.
It's happened only on a state level.
In 2018, the California Consumer Privacy Act was enacted,
giving California users the legal right
to know what data is collected,
the right to delete personal information held by businesses,
and the right to opt out of the sale
of personal information.
Other states are following California's lead.
Nevada passed similar legislation,
and New York, Texas, and Washington have also proposed
legislation similar to California's privacy act.
In other states, legal rights to data privacy
are not nearly as clear or strong.
So in the case of the US,
what we do know is that large amounts of data,
including location tracking,
are already being collected.
The questions become what we as a nation
will do with that data to confront the COVID-19 crisis,
whether the public is willing to release it,
and how we will protect that data going forward.