The past year has been a rocky one as it seemed things were going to return to normal only for cases to spike and send our officials into a backspin to masks and no open venues. Clicking on the news seemed a numbers game as all these cases were springing up by the week with a whole population coming out of positive testings. How is it that the world as a whole seemed to take a sharp turn off a cliff and plunge into a serious pandemic after all we’ve learned from 2020? The truth is, those numbers are at best estimates, and the reality is no less a relief but makes for a better explanation. At the beginning of last year, healthcare centers and experts had few means to keep track of the spread of Covid, relying almost entirely on reporting after the fact for positive cases in different locations, some across the states seemingly unconnected with little notice of shared symptoms to determine a pandemic before it wracked the whole nation.
Since personal health monitors came onto the mass market, companies have looked for ways to utilize the oceans of data they get on users’ heart rate, sleep patterns, and other factors in ways both beneficial and at times seemingly intrusive. When doctors needed to find trends in the influenza pandemic back in 2018, they looked at companies tracking smart thermostats to see how people feeling the high fever of the flu spiked their air conditioning despite the cool outer climates. Fitbit proved a wealth of information for its overnight reading of user’s sleep cycle and resting pulse rate to see who was up with breathing issues during a sharp spike in respiratory-related flu strains.
As users got more informed on personal data tracking, mobile applications soon sprung up to report and document signs of infection by concerned citizens. Companies originally geared to selling audiences on ads and online shopping soon found their platforms perfectly suited to link Covid finders with information on testing sites and even live MDs to walk them through proper diagnostics of their condition and treatment.
Google and Apple have even noticed technology’s role in preventing outbreaks, having announced partnerships to provide the health structure with iOs and Android capable contact tracing data. What’s collected will be used to provide real-time information on reported cases and link professionals to facilities facing upticks in their ward occupancy. The next phase, introducing Bluetooth technology to several public and governmental health official groups to promote more efficiency in the nation’s healthcare system.
Smaller, more local social technology companies are also investing themselves in what’s been called the Covid Tracing Tracker. Building on social networking, states and countries are joining a network of notification moderation to link healthcare officials to first response calls and notifications from the public. The project is highly ethical, with information parameters limiting personal data to specifically relating a positive case of Covid’s location through proximity tracking to keep the individual’s privacy intact. Once it notifies the health officials through the network, the information gets scrubbed after a short period, so nothing is stored for malicious use or marketing. The info network is open-sourced, with a running log of updates and changes run through supervision, meaning nothing’s changed without informing all companies and developers in the network. Changes like these came from the trend of social media and personal data targeting by bad companies that stoked public hesitancy to have any form of government keeping eyes over their private lives.
Tracking people’s activity has always been a hotly debated topic. Recent examples of tracking apps being used to endanger people’s private lives can be found in every media adept country, with such high reliance populations in South Korea, Israel, and India, where governments have felt the urgency in containing covid levels, influence their policymaking.
In the United States, there has been a varying response to containment due to different municipalities’ level of involvement and general willingness to impose mandates on their state’s residents. Some high-risk cities are moving to make their own tracing programs with aid from high-tech firms, such as the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut pairing up to trace patients through John Hopkins Hospital. Tracing an entire city is no small feat, as former mayor Bloomberg of the Hopkins School of Medicine has even stated it will be costly, time-consuming, and hard to implement. Similar tracing programs in high-risk cities face the same issues, with other tools such as AI face recognition and Drone crowd tracing on the table for possible future use. Individual tracers on physically identified covid affected patients are the most effective means, with the next step to make the data collection more streamlined to curb the rate of infection. Until a system is fully verified, governments and companies alike will have to walk a fine line to get patients’ information with as little disruption as possible.
Technology in the medical sphere has let doctors advance human health, with a patient’s wellbeing analyzed to give more insight into treating and curing what ails them. As the pools of data build up, there is a point where health care providers need to play the politics game to decide where the boundaries are and how much is too much information. Covid has pushed many hospitals and front-line workers to the limit. In the aftermath of the first spike, there has been a new push to get more use out of identifying and tracking positive covid cases. For government and healthcare officials alike, the road to finding the perfect tool for covid is a work in progress. Until the next big breakthrough comes, hard work and diligence are needed as much as the latest app for a recovering world.