School of Computer Science and Mathematics

6100COMP Project

Final Report Submitted by

Basal Mesho
879452
Computer science

Contact Tracing Website

Supervised by

Pavel Semukhin
Submitted on

22nd April 2022

Table of contents
Acknowledgement.................................................................................................................................2
Abstract.................................................................................................................................................2
Background............................................................................................................................................3
Problems statement..........................................................................................................................4
Aims and Objectives..........................................................................................................................5
Literature review...................................................................................................................................5
Methodology.........................................................................................................................................5
Design....................................................................................................................................................6
Implementation.....................................................................................................................................6
Testing And Evaluation..........................................................................................................................6
Conculsion And Furthework..................................................................................................................6
References.............................................................................................................................................7

Acknowledgement

Abstract
Background

The pandemic of COVID-19 and the speedy spread of it around the world has put health
services under the danger. Therefore, Contact tracing becomes one of the most major
public health public health intervention and a critical component of comprehensive
strategies to control the spread of COVID-19. The World Health Organization (WHO) On
March 11, 2020 , characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic. A wide range of interventions
have been proposed to control it, including contact tracing. (WHO) guidelines for contact
tracing state that “At least 80% of new cases should have their close contacts traced and in
quarantine within 72 hours of case confirmation. However, the (WHO) does not cite peer-
reviewed evidence to support these guidelines, and some studies suggest that tracing needs
to be more thorough and prompt to be effective .

Contact tracing is a cost effective technological tool to reduce infection rates. It works by
notifying those who have been in contact with known virus carriers and asking them to self-
isolate for a few days. More than 45 governments worldwide have launched websites and
apps that allow individuals to: (a) run a self-diagnostic, and (b) receive information about
whether they have been in recent contact with an infected person. Large technology
companies including Apple and Google have added to the effort by building on their existing
technology and reach within communities.

Breaking the chains of human-to-human transmission through contact tracing by identifying

people exposed to confirmed cases, quarantining them, monitoring them to ensure rapid
isolation, and testing and treatment in case they develop symptoms is very essential in
checkmating the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the other disease.

Especially now, as many countries begin to publish out their stay-at-home policies and set
community-level physical distancing measures , many developers and researchers are
working closely with public health authorities in exploring different options to support contact
tracing with technological tools.

Contact tracing is a term used to define the general public health strategies and the actions
that involved in following up and tracing contacts. Therefore contact tracing websites
cannot be said to do ‘contact tracing’ but rather ‘proximity tracking’ and ‘exposure
notification’, i.e. tracking and alerting users who have been in close proximity with each
other. The fundamental principles of test and trace are classifying the infected people, or the
groups of people, through testing, and tracing their contacts as early as possible (House of
Commons, 2021).

The aim of contact tracing is to disrupt transmission chains by making sure that persons who
have been in contact with an infected individual are notified that they are at increased risk of
infection and how to take action to prevent passing the infection to others. So in general
contact tracing is the process of identifying all people that have a positive result and they
have come in contact with the other people in the last few weeks. The ability to follow the
exposure and level of contagion is a key strategy for preventing further spread of infectious
diseases including COVID19 (The Health Foundation, 2021).
The ECDC (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) guidance on contact
tracing for COVID-19 provides the basic principles on how to undertake conventional contact
tracing, including the classification of contacts . ECDC has also published guidance on how
to scale up contact tracing efforts to handle larger numbers of cases, using both additional
human resources and different types of technologies (ECDC, 2021).

Problems statement
 How to protect privacy?

One of the main problems related to contact tracing websites is data protection.
Contact tracing, by nature, immediately opens up significant privacy concerns.
Issues such as the retention of personal identifying data, the perception that
reporting an infection may impact healthcare or insurance availability, the disclosure
of data with third parties, and the potential for security breaches have all been
discussed concerning contact tracing applications since the beginning of the
pandemic.

 User adaptability
The success of contact tracing largely depends on user adaptability. These websites
and apps face a low penetration rate among the masses , e.g. Australia’s
COVIDSafe has a 28.6% penetration rate, Singapore’s TraceTogether has a 25%
penetration, India’s Aarogya Setu has 12.05%, Turkey’s Hayat Eve Sığar has 17%
and UK’s NHS COVID-19 App has 28.5%, which are among the highest and many
are below the 10% adoption e.g. Japan’s COCOA has 6.09% and France’s
TousAntiCovid has 3.58.
It is a challenge to achieve high user adaptability, given that the users are sceptical
about the privacy issues surrounding the use of data generated through these
websites or apps (Anon., n.d.).
 Privacy and ethical issues
The contact-tracing process includes gathering privacy-sensitive information of
individuals. However, privacy-conscious people generally show reluctance to share
their sensitive information, obstructing the whole contact-tracing procedure.
Therefore, privacy-preserving contact-tracing are more likely to be adopted by a large
user base. Privacy-preserving contact tracing has been proposed even before the
COVID-19 pandemic. Proposals include Efficient Privacy-preserving contact-tracing
for Infection Detection (EPIC)  and ENcounter-based Architecture for Contact Tracing
(ENACT) . These techniques were developed for privacy-preserving contact tracing
 and can be useful in the current scenario as well. Most of the well-known contact
tracing websites or apps have some level of privacy built-in (Aarathi Prasad, 2017).

Aims and Objectives

The aim of this research is to develop a software to effectively share the test and contact-
trace data of a large proportion of population between relevant organisations including
testing laboratories, tracers and government officials.

Objectives:

o To develop a website that enables testing facilities to add test results to the
database.
o To develop a website that aims to control the spread by ensuring that the people
can be tested when necessary , and by identifying close contacts of people who
have tested positive (positive cases) and asking them to self-isolate.
o To send automatic notification to human tracers via the website once a positive
result is added to the system.
o To enable the extraction of trends from the database to generate reports and
maps.

Literature review

Contact tracing can greatly support testing, tracing, isolating, and quarantine measures in
the attempt to mitigate and slow the spread of the of the people who’s been tested positive
by speeding up processes of reporting and contact tracing through improved digital data
flow, proximity tracing and geolocation tracking. It could play a pivotal role given the ubiquity
of internet-connected devices and increase the speed of surveillance of a large population of
users in almost real-time to know where the infection hotspots are. As lockdown measures
are gradually being lifted in many countries, contact tracing are central to control strategies
during the de-escalation of social distancing . It can also be crucial in flagging more
infections especially in scenarios where manual contact tracing cannot. For example, a yet-
to-be diagnosed person has the covid virus and takes a crowded bus to work; manual
contact tracing is unlikely to identify everyone on the bus standing close to the infected
person. Indeed, a study by Kucharski found that combined testing and contact tracing
strategies significantly reduced the reproductive number more than mass testing or self-
isolation alone (Kerstin N. Vokingera, Vasileios Nittas, 2020).
In East Asian countries such as China and especially Taiwan, contact tracing websites and
apps have been mandatory and proved effective in identifying new cases since the end of
lockdown. The websites and apps generally work by assigning a colour code (green, yellow,
or red) using an algorithmic assessment of the user’s travel history and health status. People
who can show a green health code can demonstrate that they have not been in contact
with a confirmed case of COVID-19 (Wang CJ, 2020). In South Korea, contact tracing apps
such as the ‘Corona 100’ seems to be popular and has enabled public health officials to
reduce the time needed to trace a patient’s movements from around 24 h to approximately
10 min and thus, helped the general public avoid infectious areas (Xu W, 2020).
South Korea’s extensive contact tracing, testing, and isolation measures received
overwhelming support from the population and have helped to reduce the virus’s spread
(Zastrow, 2020) . Laws passed and data transparency during the MERS outbreak in 2015
allows the South Korean government to collect and publish public data including travel
histories of confirmed patients. Hence, the privacy of the population has been given up to the
government especially in response to public health safety. To ensure people under
compulsory home quarantines do not stray from the confines of their apartments, the Hong
Kong government required compulsory download of the ‘StayHomeSafe’ app and provided
geofencing electronic tracker wristbands that alert authorities if they violated quarantines.
These approaches have significantly contributed to the mass acceptance of contact tracing
so far in the region.
There is little evidence to suggest that the use of these types of approaches adopted in East
Asian countries might be successfully transferable to neo-liberal societies such as the USA,
UK, France, Germany etc. with different political and cultural systems. Controversies about
the legitimacy of these apps and websites have largely focused on issues of privacy and
surveillance as commentators emphasized the differences between populations in East.
Asia’s acceptance of state surveillance and a European scepticism towards this practice .
The barrier appears to be that many of these countries especially in Europe are very
sensitive to privacy issues and privacy is protected by law like the General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR) . A study by Hernandez-Orallo shows that for possible second waves of
infection, contact tracing websites and apps can be effective in controlling the SARS-Cov-2
virus, assuming that a percentage of the population will have gained immunity, or
implemented in combination with some other lenient measures, such as social distancing.
Moreover, for many of such countries that are resuming business operations and social
activities, or where protests are happening and the number of social contacts increases, it
will be worthwhile for them to invest in strategies to vastly improve the mass acceptance of
contact-tracing apps to enable rapid response to a resurgence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus .
However, the apparent dilemma faced by neo-liberal governments is making a conscious
choice between privacy and public health whilst showing the efficacy of such apps
(Hernandez-Orallo E, 2020).
Methodology

Design

Implementation

Testing And Evaluation

Conculsion And Furthework

References
Aarathi Prasad, D. K., 2017. Proceedings of the 4th International on Workshop on Physical Analytics.
Association for Computing Machiner, pp. 37-42 .https://doi.org/10.1145/3092305.3092310.

Anon., n.d. Covid tracing tracker - read only. [Online]

Available at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ATalASO8KtZMx__zJREoOvFh0nmB-sAqJ1-
CjVRSCOw/edit#gid=0

ECDC, 2021. Coronaviruses. [Online]

Available at: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/latest-evidence/coronaviruses
[Accessed 20 October 2021].

Hernandez-Orallo E, M. P. C. C. C. J.-C., 2020. Evaluating how smartphone contact tracing technology

can reduce the spread of infectious diseases: the case of COVID-19. IEEE , pp. 99083 -
99097.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102178.

House of Commons, 2021. COVID-19: Test, track, London: House of Commons.

Kerstin N. Vokingera, Vasileios Nittas, 2020. Digital health and the COVID-19 epidemic: an
assessment framework for apps from an epidemiological and legal perspective. Swiss Med Wkly.
https://doi.org/10.4414/smw.2020.20282.

The Health Foundation, 2021. NHS Test and Trace performance tracker. [Online]
Available at: https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/charts-and-infographics/nhs-test-and-
trace-performance-tracker
[Accessed 21st October 2021].

Wang CJ, N. C. B. R., 2020. Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan. JAMA.

https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.3151.

Xu W, W. J. C. L., 2020. COVID-19 pandemic in China: Context, experience and lessons. Health Policy
and Technology.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hlpt.2020.08.006.

Zastrow, M., 2020. South Korea is reporting intimate details of COVID-19 cases: has it helped?.
[Online]
Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00740-y
[Accessed 20 Feb 2022].