Do we need a Contact Tracing App?

05/20/2020

∙

by   Leonardo Maccari, et al.

∙

0

∙

share

The goal of this paper is to shed some light on the usefulness of a contact tracing smartphone app for the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. We review the basics of contact tracing during the spread of a virus, we contextualize the numbers to the case of COVID-19 and we analyse the state of the art for proximity detection using Bluetooth Low Energy. Our contribution is to assess if there are scientific evidences that suggest a contact tracing app, using present technologies, could be effective to slow down the spread of the virus. Our conclusion is that such evidences are lacking, and we should re-think the introduction of such a privacy-invasive measure.