through walls, Bluetooth signals can. A user
who has spent all day working indoors may
receive an alert that they came into contact
with a confirmed COVID-19 patient who walked
past their house, but Apple and Google plan to
use Received Signal Strength Indication which
will determine whether the phones were in
proximity to one another. It won’t be the perfect
solution, and some will unnecessarily be told to
isolate or test when they do not need to, but it is
indeed a better solution than the alternative: no
tracing, and long-term lockdown.
PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
When COVID-19 is a distant nightmare and a
vaccine has been distributed around the world,
it is hoped that systems like the one introduced
by Google and Apple will change the way we
cope with future humanitarian disasters. Some
governments have worked hard to introduce
their own systems, most noticeably in the
United States with its Emergency Alert
System, and in South Korea, where emergency
SMS alerts have been widely praised for
slowing the spread of the COVID-19 crisis in
the country. However, others have struggled