The US, UK, and Australia all have their own Covid-19 contact-tracing apps. Here’s what you need to know about them.
One thing that’s come out of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is the development of a new type of app. These are known as contact-tracing apps, and you’ve likely heard of them.
The name gives you the core idea of what these apps do – essentially allowing users to identify if they may have been in contact with someone infected with the coronavirus.
However, while a number of countries around the world are planning to start using contact-tracing apps (and in some cases already have started), the exact apps and systems vary from place to place.
Below then, we’ll give you an overview of the solutions being worked on for the US, UK, and Australia. But first though, here’s a closer look at what exactly contact-tracing apps do.
Contact-tracing isn’t a new idea. All it really means is attempting to identify people that may have contracted a specific illness, usually by asking someone who’s known to have it where they’ve been and who they’ve been in contact with.
But with Covid-19 the scale of the challenge is much greater than normal, given how many people already have it and how easily it spreads. So rather than questioning individuals, contact-tracing apps are being designed to automate the legwork.
These would run in the background on your phone, tracking where you’ve been and who you’ve been in contact with. If someone you’ve been in contact with tests positive for Covid-19 (and enters that data into the app), then the app would alert you to this, so you would know to self-isolate or get tested yourself.
It’s a method then of not just tracking who already has Covid-19, but of potentially getting countries safely up and running again while we wait for a vaccine. Though of course how effective it is depends not just on the technology of each specific contact-tracing app, but also on how many people have the relevant app running on their phones.
The main contact-tracing app used in the US is likely to be a joint venture from Apple and Google, so of course the same app would work on both iOS and Android. Powered by Bluetooth, the app would exchange anonymous ‘beacon keys’ with everyone you come in contact with (assuming they’re also using the app).
Then, if someone tests positive for Covid-19, they’re able to log this with the contact-tracing app, and it would alert those who the person came in contact with that they’d been exposed to the virus.
The alert may not come until days later, as the infected person may not have initially known they were infected, and the contract tracing app only ‘periodically’ downloads the beacon keys of everyone who has tested positive in a user’s region.
