Can contact tracing apps help fight Hantavirus? Not real

After three people They died on a cruise ship infected with the Hanta virus, and authorities are tracking down 29 people who left the ship. They are trying to track the spread of the virus. It is a long, arduous and global process to find and notify people who may be at risk of infection.

Wait, wasn’t there supposed to be an app for that?

Contact tracing apps were a global effort that began in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Contact tracing, enabled by phone companies like Apple and Google, is designed to use Bluetooth connections to detect and report when people have been in contact with someone who has or will later test positive for Covid. It has not done much to solve the problem of the spread of the epidemic, but tracking the virus has at least become more effective. The same process will not work well for the Hanta virus problem.

“There is no use of apps in the Hantavirus outbreak,” Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an email response to WIRED. “The number of cases is small, and it is important to carefully trace all contacts to stop transmission.”

On a smaller scale of infections like this, officials must start at the source (an infected individual) and then go down to each person individually, to ascertain where they have gone and who they may have come into contact with. The data that apps collect from a wide range of devices will not be anywhere near accurate enough to give a good idea of ​​where the virus might go next.

Contact tracing on a larger scale, such as in a global pandemic for example, is less about tracking individual infections and more about understanding what parts of the population may be affected, giving people the opportunity to self-quarantine after exposure. But this depends on how people choose to respond, and how technology is used by public emergency systems. During the Covid pandemic, contact tracing via apps tended to work better in more carefully managed European countries, but it did not slow the spread of the disease in the United States.

Providing access to this kind of information close to devices has also brought with it all kinds of privacy concerns, since the technology will require constant access to work properly. Contact tracing also struggles to maintain accuracy, and in some cases can provide false negatives or positives that do not help provide true information about the spread of the virus.

Especially in the case of something like the Hantavirus, where everyone on that cruise ship could theoretically be traced and contacted directly, it’s best to do this process the hard way.

“During small but highly lethal outbreaks, greater precision is needed,” Gourley wrote.