For all the controversy over decentralized contact-tracing apps, data show that these privacy-preserving tools saved thousands of lives during the pandemic
. Instead of relying on centralized data collection, analysts can use questionnaires or approaches such as telemetry to map how many notifications were made and where, how many of these happened on phones that also reported a positive test result and so on. All of this can be done without revealing the identities of the people whose phones were receiving the alerts.
Few countries gathered these data during the chaos of the first year of the pandemic, but the United Kingdom did. A study conducted during the first three months of the UK National Health Service’s deployment of a decentralized contact-tracing app — the NHS COVID-19 app for England and Wales — showed that the app could trace more than twice as many contacts as could conventional contact tracing. Two analysis methods were used: one using modelling and the other a statistical approach.
The most compelling evidence yet, however, comes from an analysis published earlier this year of the usage and impact of the NHS COVID-19 app in its first year of deployment. It found that the app prevented around one million infections and saved more than 9,600 lives in England and Wales between September 2020 and September 2021. And it achieved this even though, on average over the year, only around 25% of the population was using it .
The WHO is not yet a leading actor in digital health, and a separate organization should be created to focus on further developing digital contact-tracing technology, in collaboration with the companies that control mobile operating systems. A diversity of players would need to be involved — specialists in epidemiology, privacy, psychology, the design of user-friendly interfaces and so on.
Health authorities must prioritize privacy-preserving digital contact tracing, and governments must commit to long-term investments in this area. But it is just as important that public-health systems become more digitally savvy. In the United Kingdom, people could book COVID-19 tests, receive the results and get notifications about potential exposure, all in the NHS COVID-19 app.
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