Pay Every American $1,000 to Download a Contact Tracing Application
As the United States breaks records on COVID-19 case counts and Congress weighs a new economic stimulus, Congress should look for approaches that also aid public health. Particularly, a new economic stimulus could pay every American $1,000 to download and use a digital contact tracing application.
Contact tracing applications, such as Google and Apple’s joint solution, enable smartphones to track physical proximity to other smartphones via Bluetooth. When one smartphone stays in proximity to another, they exchange random tokens. If I am diagnosed with COVID-19, I input that into an application built on Google/Apple’s system. Everyone with the application and my token on their phone will receive notification that they were near someone with COVID-19. They can then get tested, quarantine, and take other preventative action hopefully before spreading the disease themselves.
In theory, digital contact tracing can create what is effectively digital herd immunity. New cases are identified and contained so quickly that the disease cannot survive. But such immunity requires an estimated 60 percent of the population to use the solution, and reality may show the estimates are low—we may need more than 60 percent of people to use it. While lower adoption rates still improve public health, they are not enough to defeat the disease.
Global experiences with similar tools show limited public adoption. In France, less than 3 percent of the population downloaded their contact tracing application, while in Germany only 14 percent have. Some of this is likely due to declining case rates in those countries (by contrast, cases are spiking in the United States), but some hesitation is due to privacy concerns. People understandably do not want to lose control over sensitive health information.
https://slate.com/technology/2020/07/pay-americans-contact-tracing-app.html
This seems like a really good idea to me. If this worked, it might be a kind of "digital vaccine" against all viruses.
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