GoCoronaGo: Privacy Respecting Contact Tracing for COVID-19 Management
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© Indian Institute of Science 2020.
GoCoronaGo: Privacy Respecting Contact Tracing for COVID‑19 Management Yogesh Simmhan*, Tarun Rambha*, Aakash Khochare, Shriram Ramesh, Animesh Baranawal, John Varghese George, Rahul Atul Bhope, Amrita Namtirtha, Amritha Sundararajan, Sharath Suresh Bhargav, Nihar Thakkar and Raj Kiran Abstract | The COVID-19 pandemic is imposing enormous global chal‑ lenges in managing the spread of the virus. A key pillar to mitigation is contact tracing, which complements testing and isolation. Digital apps for contact tracing using Bluetooth technology available in smartphones have gained prevalence globally. In this article, we discuss various capabilities of such digital contact tracing, and its implication on com‑ munity safety and individual privacy, among others. We further describe the GoCoronaGo institutional contact tracing app that we have devel‑ oped, and the conscious and sometimes contrarian design choices we have made. We offer a detailed overview of the app, backend platform and analytics, and our early experiences with deploying the app to over 1000 users within the Indian Institute of Science campus in Bangalore. We also highlight research opportunities and open challenges for digital contact tracing and analytics over temporal networks constructed from them. Keywords: COVID, Digital contact tracing, Mobile apps, Bluetooth, Temporal networks
1 Introduction Contagious viral diseases such as the SARS-CoV (2002), H1N1 (2009), MERS-CoV (2012), and SARS-CoV-2 (2019) have resulted in global epidemic outbreaks and placed a massive burden on public health systems around the world. These pandemics have cascading effects that result in irreparable consequences to economies and quality of life. The recent SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 pandemic has triggered national and regional lockdowns across the world to curb the spread of the virus. With incubation periods that last days and with a significant fraction of asymptomatic carriers, the proliferation of the disease has been hard to detect and localize. Further, testing of populations at a large-scale has proved challenging due to limited testing kits, well-trained health-care professionals, and funds in emerging economies42. To tackle this problem, governments and health workers use ContactTracing of infected
J. Indian Inst. Sci. | VOL xxx:x | xxx–xxx 2020 | journal.iisc.ernet.in
individuals to identify those who may have come in contact with them, also called primary contacts. These primary contacts are then quarantined and/ or tested depending on their symptoms. Testing, tracing, and isolation form essential components of COVID-19 management, besides preventive measures like wearing masks, practising Social Distancing , and washing hands39. Traditional methods of contact tracing are often laborious and may be erroneous due to recall biases2, 38 . Also, human activity patterns often involve interactions with strangers, especially when travelling, which makes it difficult to identify contacts using traditional methods. As a
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