The contact tracing as a useful tool to limit the spread of the disease and, consequently, to keep away the risk of having to run into another lockdown with all that would also follow from an economic point of view. Yet another demonstration from a study just published by Oxford University that testifies to the potential of the technology behind systems such as our application Immune.
Contact tracing: Immuni & co. better than lockdown
What emerges has in fact been evidence for some time for professionals and for those who have voluntarily chosen to download the software by contributing to the initiative: the more we are, the better. In an ideal scenario, if we all had the app installed on our smartphone, we could alert those who came in contact with the coronavirus thus breaking the chain of contagion. A utopia if we take i current numbers, but all is not lost.
This is the comment by Christophe Fraser, co-author of the research as well as scientific advisor to the Test & Trace Program for the British government and leader of Pathogen Dynamics for the Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford University.
In the UK we have evaluated different levels of contact tracing detection. We have seen that in any case, both in the UK and in the USA, it has the potential to significantly reduce the number of cases of contagion, hospitalizations and deaths among the population. For example, in Washington state, a well-crafted manual contact tracing system coupled with one for exposure notifications can reduce infections by up to 15% and deaths by up to 11%.
Certainly Immune and the other applications for contact tracing must find use in a company that has already matured and adopted compliance with the rules of conduct imposed by the situation: physical distancing first of all, but also the use of the mask where indicated and necessary, at least until we have an effective cure or vaccine to make COVID-19 a distant, bad memory.
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