What is Contact Tracing | Can IoT-Technologies Help

As the Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to spread, organizations face a variety of issues regarding maintaining a productive workforce while keeping their employees healthy. We’ve all been confronted with the complications of trying to work during this pandemic. Entire industries have shuttered, workers losing their jobs or furloughed and trying to navigate the antiquated unemployment process where state websites were constantly crashing, overloaded servers and just not updated with the information we need.

Modern problems require modern solutions! The problem with that statement is that it doesn’t necessarily account for the ever-changing landscape that C19 has dropped in our laps. We’re 6 months into a “pandemic” and the information we’re getting is constantly changing. So how are businesses supposed to keep up? Well, that’s where the beauty of IoT-enabled technologies comes into play. Being able to collect, decipher and transmit data in real-time is one of the ways businesses, counties and even states are able to keep up with new information, process what’s going on and deliver live data to the public.

Cities, counties and states start to ease their restrictions and allow businesses to reopen, folks are returning to work in droves while there are still A LOT of unanswered questions… lack of processes… and general confusion around what we’re able to do and what precautions are we supposed to implement? Are we wearing face masks to work? Are we still maintaining a 6ft separation with co-workers? What does that mean for shared spaces like locker rooms and lunch rooms? Owners & managers continue to struggle to find concrete resolutions that everyone can follow while being able to adequately perform their job duties in a comfortable, stress-free, worry-free environment.

One of the measures that is quickly gaining momentum is Contact Tracing. There’s been A LOT of talk in the news and across social media about what it is, what it does, who runs it, what are they trying to do, is it helpful and how is it supposed to slow the spread of COVID-19?

An important component of our mission here at SBT Alliance, in addition to offering cutting-edge IoT enabled solutions for transforming your facility into a SMART space, is to provide you with as many sales agnostic research tools and solutions as possible so you can make the best, well-informed decisions to help your business grow and flourish. So now Contact Tracing has started gaining traction, we feel it’s important to start building out a similar book of resources as we did with our COVID-19 resources for contractors; a central source that everyone can use to get update industry related information.

The first order of business in making sense of all this Contact Tracing talk is to really outline what it really is and what it means… and what it means to have an IoT-enabled solution ready and at the waiting to help keep your business safe and your employees healthy. Let’s get started…

What is Contact Tracing?

And subsequently… what it’s NOT!

In public health, contact tracing is the process of identification of persons who may have come into contact with an infected person (“contacts”) and subsequent collection of further information about these contacts. By tracing the contacts of infected individuals, testing them for infection, treating the infected and tracing their contacts in turn, public health aims to reduce infections in the population. Diseases for which contact tracing is commonly performed for include tuberculosis, vaccine-preventable infections like measles, sexually transmitted infections (including HIV), blood-borne infections, some serious bacterial infections, and novel infections (e.g. SARS-CoV, H1N1, and COVID-19). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_tracing)

Some of the goals of Contact Tracing include:

To interrupt ongoing transmission and reduce the spread of an infection
To alert contacts to the possibility of infection and offer preventive counseling or prophylactic care
To offer diagnosis, counseling and treatment to already infected individuals
If the infection is treatable, to help prevent reinfection of the originally infected patient
To learn about the epidemiology of a disease in a particular population

Contact tracing typically involves the following steps:

An individual is identified as having a communicable disease (often called the index case). This case may be reported to public health or managed by the primary health care provider.
The index case is interviewed to learn about their movements, whom they have been in close contact with or who their sexual partners have been.
Depending on the disease and the context of the infection, family members, health care providers, and anyone else who may have knowledge of the case’s contacts may also be interviewed.
Once contacts are identified, public health workers contact them to offer counseling, screening, prophylaxis, and/or treatment.
Contacts may be isolated (e.g. required to remain at home) or excluded (e.g. prohibited from attending a particular location, like a school) if deemed necessary for disease control.
If contacts are not individually identifiable (e.g. members of the public who attended the same location), broader communications may be issued, like media advisories.

Now that we’ve helped develop a framework for understanding what Contact Tracing is and what it’s being used for in conjunction with COVID-19, let’s try to dispel some of the errant information, quiet the fear mongering and put some of the awful conjecture flying around social media to rest shall we… let’s do it!

What Contact Tracing is NOT!

Contact Tracing is NOT the government trying to track your every move
Contact Tracing is NOT you receiving some subcutaneous microchip like a dog or cat in case they get lost
Contact Tracing is NOT a tracking methodology so advertisers can feed you a bunch of ads
Contact Tracing is NOT an app that allows someone to keep tabs on you
Contact Tracing is NOT some government conspiracy designed to control the population

While there has been A LOT of talk around Contract Tracing & the various technologies that are being developed to help flatten the COVID-19 curve, the idea of Contact Tracing has been around for decades. One of the first successful adoptions of Contact Tracing protocols was used to help contain the smallpox outbreak in the 40s and 50s. The eradication of smallpox was achieved not by universal immunization, but by exhaustive contact tracing to find all infected persons. This was followed by isolation of infected individuals and immunization of the surrounding community and contacts at-risk of contracting smallpox.

So now that we’ve laid sufficient groundwork for identifying what Contact Tracing is and what’s it for, we’ve also started to build out a number of resources to provide you with additional research highlights and technological innovations that can help keep a healthier workplace.