Hey, shouldn’t there have been an app for this?
Contact-tracing apps were a global effort that began in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Enabled by phone companies like Apple and Google, contact tracing was designed to use Bluetooth connections to find out if people had come in contact with someone who later tested positive for Covid and would report it. This didn’t do much to solve the spread of the pandemic, but tracking the virus at least became more effective. The same process will not be good for the hantavirus problem.
“Apps have no use for this hantavirus outbreak,” Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an email response to WIRED. “The number of cases is low, and it is important to accurately trace all contacts to prevent transmission.”
On the smaller scale of such infections, authorities have to start at the source (an infected person), then go person-by-person to confirm where they went and who they may have come into contact with. The data collected by apps from different devices will not be accurate enough to know where the virus may reach next.
Contact tracing on a wide scale, such as, say, a global pandemic, is less about tracking individual infections and more about understanding which parts of the population may be affected, giving people the opportunity to self-quarantine after exposure. But it depends on how people choose to respond, and how the technology is used by public emergency systems. During the Covid pandemic, contact-tracing through apps began to work better in more carefully managed European countries, but the spread has not slowed in the US.
Making devices accessible to such proximity information has also raised all sorts of concerns about privacy, given that the technology will require always-on access to function properly. Contact tracing has also struggled to maintain accuracy, and in some cases can provide false negative or positive information that does not help give real information about the spread of the virus.
Especially in the case of something like hantavirus, where every person on that cruise ship could theoretically be directly tracked and contacted, it’s better to do that process the hard way.
“During small but highly deadly outbreaks, greater precision is required,” Gurley wrote.
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