Planning for the Next Pandemic: A Global, Interoperable System of Contact Tracing

Around the world, few true global leaders emerged to address the crisis; the international institutions established to handle this type of work, including the World Health Organization, faced funding cuts when states should have been tripping over one another to fund and support them properly.2 We have learned, yet again, that there is no way forward during a pandemic such as the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 without a massive, well-coordinated testing regime plus a system of contact tracing, absent a widely distributed vaccine and prior to herd immunity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, among many others, called for greater accessibility and more affordable access to testing.5 While a sound national strategy would be helpful, ramped up testing can presumably be managed locally and regionally.6 Unlike testing, contact tracing, by its nature, needs to be coordinated across geographic and political boundaries. If someone tests [End Page 6] positive for the virus, that person’s mobile phone can communicate with a database that then informs people with whom they have been in contact, via a mobile app, that they need to get tested and perhaps self-quarantine.13 As of September 1, 2020, Google and Apple declared that their future smartphones would be equipped with what they called a “privacy-protective” contact tracing feature.14 This high-tech approach, too, faces important challenges and limitations and has been slow to be adopted.15 There are myriad variations on these low-tech and high-tech themes. Building upon this measure of trust, the Swiss system has offered an example of contact tracing that others might emulate.17 Similarly, the South Korean contact tracing effort has helped keep the level of COVID-19 spread much lower than many other countries despite the early arrival of the disease (January 20, 2020, the same day as the first recorded case in the United States) and the population density (there being 50 million-plus people on the southern part of the Korean peninsula).18 Communities on a scale smaller than a city or a state, such as university campuses, also rolled out their own approaches to digital contract tracing.