How To Trace, Test And Treat COVID-19 Patients Via Smart Phones

Tracing COVID-19 patients has now taken to technology which will see the process eased by a huge margin especially for countries that have to deal with escapee patients.

The news of escapees from quarantine and giving of wrong contact information will now be a problem of the past as telecom giants Google and Apple have added the COVID-19 Exposure Notifications option on both iOS and Android as a background update to be adopted in contact tracing.

The technological technique will be used by public health authorities to contact and give guidance to anyone who may have been exposed to a person who has contracted the COVID-19 virus.

This will all start with COVID-19 Exposure Notifications on your smartphone. They will enable contact tracing apps to send you a notification if you’ve likely been exposed to the disease.

To check the COVID-19 tracing feature in your smartphone go under ‘Google Settings’ for android and ‘Privacy, then ‘Health’ for iOS, you will find this feature there

Once the COVID-19 tracing app has been developed and integrated, you will be able to see those exposed around your location

If you have COVID-19, you may share that info with the app to help alert the people you’ve been in contact with as the App relies on patients relaying their status information.

If you’ve been exposed to someone who has shared they have COVID-19, the app will notify you and give you further instructions.

When you turn on Exposure Notifications your phone shares random IDs with other nearby phones have turned on the Exposure Notifications System. The details shared include date, duration, and signal strength associated with exposure.

To help ensure these random IDs can’t be used to identify you or your location, they change every 10-20 minutes. Your phone and the phones around you will work in the background to exchange these privacy-preserving random IDs via Bluetooth. You do not need to have the app open for this process to take place.

Your phone periodically checks all the random IDs associated with positive COVID-19 cases against its own list. It’s important to note that the random IDs are automatically deleted after 14 days. If you have COVID-19, when you share your random ID, the app will notify others anonymously.

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