Read on Twitter
1/ COVID ( @UCSanDiego) Chronicles - July 26, 2020
Let's talk about #COVID19 contact tracing...almost 27k #COVID19 cases in @SanDiegoCounty, and county staff can NOT keep up. Despite hiring >200 contact tracers, just 10% of cases are now investigated within 24 hours!
Let's talk about #COVID19 contact tracing...almost 27k #COVID19 cases in @SanDiegoCounty, and county staff can NOT keep up. Despite hiring >200 contact tracers, just 10% of cases are now investigated within 24 hours!
2/ Contact tracing works great for sexually transmitted infections, but does not scale well for a pandemic caused by a respiratory disease spread by airborne droplets. So what should we do? Hire more contact tracers? https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/story/2020-07-20/county-to-hire-309-more-covid-investigators
3/ Recent models show that "minimizing contact tracing delays, for instance with app-based technology, further enhanced effectiveness, with the potential to prevent up to 80% of all transmissions." https://twitter.com/calonghurst/status/1284606506759942144
4/ @Apple and @Google launched an API to support "exposure notification" apps over 2 months ago, but the decision to use this tech lies with each US state public health department. Note that apps using this API cannot be used for location tracking!
https://twitter.com/calonghurst/status/1263699131429609479
https://twitter.com/calonghurst/status/1263699131429609479
5/ It is time for public health leaders to endorse voluntary, state-wide, privacy-preserving, exposure notification apps to augment manual contact tracing efforts. European countries including Germany and Great Britain have all adopted this tech.
https://twitter.com/calonghurst/status/1274029838366461952
https://twitter.com/calonghurst/status/1274029838366461952
6/ Predictably, there are numerous "exposure notification" alternatives emerging that do not use the @Apple / @Google API - such as @NOVIDApp from @CarnegieMellon https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2020/june/novid-update.html
7/ As US public health departments defer decisions on state-wide privacy-preserving exposure notification apps, I predict major employers will begin endorsing alternative solutions, creating a fragmented environment that exacerbates #COVID19 disparities. 
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