After three people died on a cruise ship hit by a hantavirusthe authorities are actively tracking 29 people who had left the ship. They try to trace the spread of the virus. It is a long and arduous global process to find and inform people who may be at risk of infection.
Hey, wasn’t there supposed to be an app for that?
Contact tracing apps were a global effort from 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Enabled by telephone companies like Apple and Googlecontact tracing was designed to use Bluetooth connections to detect when people had come into contact with someone who had or would later test positive for Covid and report it. This hasn’t done much to solve the spread of the pandemic, but tracking the virus has at least become more effective. The same process would not work well for the hantavirus problem.
“Apps are not being used for this hantavirus outbreak,” Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an email response to WIRED. “The number of cases is low and it is important to accurately trace all contacts to stop transmission. »
In the case of a smaller-scale infection like this, authorities should start at the source (an infected person) and then go person by person, confirming where they have been and who they may have come into contact with. Data collected by apps from a wide range of devices would not be accurate enough to give a good idea of where the virus goes next.
Contact tracing on a broader scale, like, say, a global pandemic, is less about tracking individual infections and more about understanding which parts of the population might be affected, giving people the option to quarantine after exposure. But it depends on how people choose to respond and how technology is used by public emergency systems. During the Covid pandemic, contact tracing through apps tended to work better in better-managed European countries, but this is not the case. slow the spread in the United States.
Making devices accessible to this type of proximity information has also brought all kinds of privacy concernsas the technology would require constant access to function properly. Contact tracing has also struggled to keep up precisionand in some cases could provide false negatives or positives that do not contribute to providing real information about the spread of the virus.
Especially in the case of something like Hantavirus, where every person on a cruise ship can theoretically be directly tracked and contacted, it’s best to do this process the hard way.
“During small but very deadly outbreaks, greater precision is needed,” Gurley wrote.
