Universities to Create Contact Tracing Mobile App for Students

score for locations. Tammy Abdolah, senior reporter at dot l A, joins us for how some universities hope to keep students safe. Thanks for joining us, Tammy, thanks so much, glad to be here. I wanted to talk about contact tracing and

this kind of notion of a social credit score. You know, everybody's been saying contact tracing is one of those key elements that states are gonna need to reopen their economies and also track the spread of the virus so that we don't fall into this thing where we have hotspots again and we overload the health care system. And right now, research at the University of Southern California, Emory University, and

the University of Texas Health Science Center. They've all received a federal research grant to create a mobile app for contact tracing. Tammy tell us a little bit about this. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to figure out a way to provide people with a sense of the risk that they face of getting COVID nineteen and of the areas that they're visiting giving them COVID nineteen.

So the idea that they've sort of been working on is creating this sort of risk score that you get based on the various locations you travel to, and those locations would be gathered via your phone. You know, you'd have to turn on location tracking and doing that, they sort of put together a risk score based on all the various places you went. So if you stay at home all day, every day for weeks at a time,

your riskcore would probably be rather low. But if you're going out and you're delivering for Amazon, your risk score my be rather high. And then they would take all the locations that you've been to and where people end up gathering at and create an aggregate risk score for those areas. And one of the reasons why this is being done this way through technology is they say that the spread of the virus is moving too fast for

manual contact tracing. So the traditional ways, somebody would call you on the phone say hey, you either tested positive or you might have been in an area or you know somebody that has tested positive, and then you go through the whole rounds. You know you should self isolate, blah blah blah, all that stuff. And they're saying that that's a little too slow for the spread that's going on right now. So they want to do this in a technological way, where as you mentioned, they can create

the maps. It can ping you maybe if you're going to an area that could be a potential hotspot. So this is kind of where they're going just to help out. The issue is that a lot of people don't even know they have this, and yet they are contagious for

one to two days for they actually developed symptoms. So it's just moving so quickly and relying on human memory to remember everyone you dealt with, met up with, Especially if we start reopening society even more in a day or in two days, it's hard to remember who you were in touch with, let alone fourteen days. And so the idea is technology can do a lot better job

remembering things. And once you start building enough data together and getting these aggregate scores put together of risk and also adding in more testing, then you start seeing, for example, if someone's risk score is between zero and one, so zero no risk one, you have it. You can see that once you aggregate for an area, when people start

turning into ones. Oh, they ended up getting it. Well, the overall risk for everywhere they went to over those fourteen days goes up, and you can see your overall risk go up as well. When are the universities getting started on this and when are they expected to have some type of app ready to go for widespread use.

So they started officially working on this per the grant on Friday, so this past Friday, May first, and the idea is that they will have this worked through and developed in the hopes of being able to put it forward for their student populations should they do returning the class in August or for the false semester. So that's sort of the plan that Saar Shahabi over at USC mentioned to me that they were all sort of discussing.

He hopes to have it ready in time for August for USC students, specifically, some of the problems that are associated with this all the time is concerns about privacy and then widespread adoption. There's always these concerns that people are just not going to want to download it, and they're not going to want to opt in for the location tracking for fear that they're going to be tracked, for fear that somebody will know where they're at at

all times. What have people involved with the grant, what have they said with regards to that. They basically say that, hey, look, you opt into location tracking for convenience all the time, whether it's for your map app or for a game, or for social reasons or free help. So they're's sort of argument is that this is a way to ensure society can return back to normal and that the economy can keep running and people also can be aware of the risk that they carry and that they may be

exposed to. The flip side is that people who are really concerned about people's privacy and surveillance, like folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are obviously worried about what this actually looks like. It's a concern obviously, but in places where they have done some of these things, South Korea and China, they've used these location based digitized contract tracing.

It's been pretty successful obviously the areas where you know there's mandated compliance so you got to get around that, but it has shown to be pretty effective. And going back to the manual contact tracing, when things are moving so fast, getting a ping on your phone might just help you avoid a problem spot that much quicker. It

would certainly just give you a better sense. And I think the argument put forward here by the professor who's sort of leading this at USC side of things, is that there have been other methodologies put for so obviously there's the manual method, which is just super slow and requires a lot of resources. And obviously Google and Apple

are put forward sort of a bluetooth method. But you know, when you rely on technology and the Bluetooth signals, then you come up with other problems such as what if your signal isn't working well? What if you are informing people that they have been exposed to someone with it, but they don't really know what to do, And we don't even really know how effective that might be in areas with tall buildings just where the signal might not

be great. Doesn't take into account whether people wearing masks or not, because the idea is to keep it rather private, um and to just have the technology do the work and give you a heads up. And so they're sort of trying to come up with a compromise between manual tracing and simply just a bluetooth f y. I that this professor worries would lead people to be sort of alarmed continuously that they might have been exposed, not know what to do, and then just be like, well, forget that,

there's nothing I can do. Anyways I might have been I might not have been continue with my life. So they're trying to come up with a compromise, if you will. But there are concerns with all of the methods and there's not any sort of perfect way to go about this. Thus far, all the experts agree that contact tracing is needed to help reopen all of our economies, and I know states are already starting to train people in contact tracing.

So I'm sure we're going to be hearing a lot more about this app once things start developing a little bit more. Tammy Abdolah, Senior reporter at dot l A, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much, really appreciate it. I'm Moscar Ramirez and this has been your daily coronavirus Upteve, don't forget effort today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday, so follow us on iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts