Contact tracking is widely used technique with lots of diseases new and old. As a university lecturer, I was tested for TB twice as a result of contact tracking when a student was found to have an active case of TB. A tracking system like Apple/Google are proposing might have saved me at least two trips to the Dallas County Health department (one for the test and one to get it read) and 5 days of quarantine in each instance, on the other hand it might also have exposed me to many others.

The effectiveness of any voluntary system is, of course, how many volunteers participate and Apple users seem to be surprisingly willing to participate. I don't know the current figures but Apple's COVID-19 app has tens of thousands of downloads, and a large number of Apple Watch user/owners have downloaded Apple's Medical Research App and are apparently participating actively in one or more of the voluntary medical research programs therein. You could argue that Apple/Google's system would leave out a lot of the lower economic groups where pandemics find vulnerable victims which is true to an extent, but from work with the homeless I know that most of them have cellphones and a surprising number of those are smartphones.

Of course with COVID-19 and any subsequent epidemics/pandemics the ready availability of accurate testing (which the current administration is apparently unable or unwilling to comprehend and/or deliver) is also a critical component. And it could potentially provide early warning of where a renewed outbreak might spread. That will remain necessary until an effective inoculation is developed and enough people are either immune or have been inoculated that "herd immunity" kicks in.

Finally medical researchers are convinced COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic because modern mobility and transportation make it inevitable they will spread and that this will happen more often than in the past.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein