18 NEWSWEEK.COM MAY 22, 2020
TECHNOLOGYefore the pandemic, the plan
would have seemed like some-
thing ripped from a distant dys-
topian future in which the human
race fully surrenders to Big Tech. On the April 10
online document, the logos of Google and Apple
sat atop a description of the companies’ joint plan
to enable America’s cellphones to keep track of ev-
eryone with whom their owners come into contact.
Who would sign on to such extensive surveillance?
Much of the world already has. In South Korea,
health officials use apps and video cameras to track
down people who came into contact with COVID-
patients before symptoms appeared. China, Singa-
pore and Australia already have phone-based con-
tact-tracing in place, and much of Europe is following
suit. The UK’s National Health Service, for instance,
has endorsed a scheme that’s undergoing a pilot test,
and Germany’s government is close behind.
As US governors consider how to open up and
allow people to go back to work, experts warn
that the coronavirus, which is still in circulation,
is almost certain to flare up again. To avoid more
emergency-room disasters like the one that over-
whelmed New York City in April, public-health of-
ficials must act aggressively to stop small outbreaks
before they develop into big ones. The key, experts
say, is contact tracing. For each new COVID-19 case,
health care workers would develop a list of peo-
ple the patient might have interacted with before
symptoms developed. Then they would contact
each one and recommend self-quarantine.
Contact tracing was used effectively during pre-
vious outbreaks, notably HIV/AIDS. With COVID-19,
inquiries wouldn’t be as intrusive as questions about
sexual partners, of course, but they would reach
many more people—in a country where citizens
take to the streets over such assaults against their
liberty as the closing of hair salons and gyms. With
the coronavirus infecting tens of thousands of peo-
ple each day, tracking down all those contacts would
take an army of healthcare workers—about 100,000,
says the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
(see page 24).
Technology, the thinking goes, might help auto-
mate the process. It’s worked in South Korea, which
achieved COVID-19 numbers that are the envy of
much of the world: as of early May, it logged fewer
than 11,000 cases, in a population of 50 million, andjust over 250 deaths—or 1/16th the U.S. per-capita
case rate, and 1/300th the death rate. More than
20 countries, including most of Asia, have already
been enlisting cellphones to help identify those who
might have been exposed to the infection, so those
people can self-isolate or get cleared by a test. Amer-
ica, with its vaunted technology industry, is a laggard.
It sounds like great news for the US, then, that
contact-tracing capabilities are coming soon to a
phone near you. As many states consider allowing
people to go back to work, health experts say that
identifying individuals who come into contact
with people who have tested positive for the virus,
so they can follow up with voluntary self-quaran-
tines, is essential for keeping the outbreak from
getting out of control. But such contact-tracing
efforts are time-consuming and labor intensive.
The hope is that all the information our phones
can pull in about us, including where we are and
who or what’s nearby, can provide a much-needed
assist, as they have in South Korea and elsewhere.BALANCING ACT
The challenge to
smartphone-based
contact tracing is
preserving privacy
while letting health care
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an app; South Korean
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