Topics Covered: Important aspects of governance, transparency and accountability, e-governance- applications, models, successes, limitations, and potential; citizens charters, transparency & accountability and institutional and other measures.
What is contact tracing?
What to study?
For Prelims: Definition by WHO.
For Mains: Significance and its need amid COVID 19 spread, previous instances of its application.
Context: Global technology giants Apple and Google have announced that they are partnering on developing contact tracing technology to help governments and health authorities tackle the novel coronavirus pandemic.
They are planning to build a comprehensive solution that includes application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technology to assist in enabling contact tracing.
Need for:
- Contact tracing is considered essential for bringing epidemics under control, and is expected to help governments in relaxing lockdown orders.
- Identifying people at the onset of symptoms and promptly isolating them reduces exposure to other persons.
- Via contact tracing, people who have come into contact with a person carrying a disease are alerted and identified.
- Additionally, prompt isolation and admission of the symptomatic person to a treatment facility decreases the delay to supportive treatment, which improves the likelihood of survival.
What is Contact tracing?
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines contact tracing as the process of identifying, assessing, and managing people who have been exposed to a disease to prevent onward transmission.
How will the coronavirus new technology by Google and Apple work?
- Phone-based matching via official apps will help alert people if they have come in contact with someone diagnosed with COVID-19.
- For this to work, COVID-19 patients would have to declare their status to the respective apps voluntarily.
- Following this, all people whose Android/iOS smartphones were detected nearby such patients, would get notified.
- This means, you will be notified even if you were around a stranger who has tested positive for the disease.
- Next, Bluetooth-based contact tracing will be built into the Android and iOS platforms, and users would be able to use the feature without downloading an app.
Sources: Indian Express.
