By Carmela Troncoso, Dan Bogdanov, Edouard Bugnion, Sylvain Chatel, Cas Cremers, Seda Gürses, Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Dennis Jackson, James R. Larus, Wouter Lueks, Rui Oliveira, Mathias Payer, Bart Preneel, Apostolos Pyrgelis, Marcel Salathé, Theresa Stadler, Michael Veale
Communications of the ACM,
September 2022,
Vol. 65 No. 9, Pages 48-57
10.1145/3524107 Comments
Contact tracing is a time-proven technique for breaking infection chains in epidemics. Public health officials interview those who come in contact with an infectious agent, such as a virus, to identify exposed, potentially infected people. These contacts are notified that they are at risk and should take efforts to avoid infecting others—for example, by going into quarantine, taking a test, wearing a mask continuously, or taking other precautionary measures.
In March 2020, as the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was peaking, traditional manual contact tracing efforts in many countries were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cases; by the rapid speed at which SARS-CoV-2 spread; and by the large fraction of asymptomatic, yet infectious, individuals.
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