An Interesting Proposal

Part of damping a pandemic is isolation, namely reducing transferal. The second, and some say a more important one, is determining exposure. Namely the virus has a latent period of say 10 days during which an infected vector, a human, can slough off virions and thus spread the infection.

If we had a way to map out the social contacts of infected people we could then map out the infectivity map. But we do, namely their smart phones record location and thus using everyone's smartphone location we can track the infected persons contacts and then notify them, and then notify who they have interacted with etc.

Now is this difficult? Hardly, Google and Facebook do it every day and the NSA does it as a matter of course. Once we have a confirmed infection we then should map out their contacts and so forth.

But even more so, if we had true wide scale testing, then we could anticipate and head off the hidden exposures. One source of the hidden exposures are younger people who have jobs at restaurants and the like, think they have the "flu" and are spreading this like wild fire.

Data is an essential key to suppressing the continuation. The carriers like Verizon and AT&T hold the key to solving this as are Facebook and Google, combined with competent and real time testing.

Do I think this will happen? Doubtful, after all it requires violation of HIPPA and lawmakers could never seem to get out of their own way.