A Tale of Two Contact-Tracing Apps – Comparing Australia’s COVIDSafe and New Zealand’s NZ COVID Tracer

Howell, Bronwyn; Potgieter, Petrus H.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3612596

Cited by 11 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Similar to many other countries, NZ has supplemented traditional approaches with newer tools, such as the use of digital technology to speed up contact tracing. 16 The NZ COVID Tracer app is now operational, 17 although it has yet to be used for contact tracing given the lack of community cases. Additional surveillance approaches can be used to provide increased assurance of elimination (eg, sentinel surveillance, sewage testing).…”

Section: Components Of Elimination and Their Implementationmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Zealand's COVID‐19 elimination strategy

Baker

Kvalsvig

Verrall

2020

Medical Journal of Australia

107

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Section: Components Of Elimination and Their Implementationmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Zealand's COVID‐19 elimination strategy

Baker

Kvalsvig

Verrall

2020

Medical Journal of Australia

107

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, contact tracing's effectiveness may be hampered by misinformation and its slow process, in which several 'generations' of disease transmission may have already occurred. In this digital age, applications like 'TraceTogether' and 'CovidSafe' in Singapore and Australia have tremendously increased the speed of tracing with the focus on significant person to person contact recorded via Bluetooth; storing information on mobile phones [22]. In addition, applications like 'NZ Covid Tracer' and 'MySejahtera' from New Zealand and Malaysia respectively allows users to check in locations via QR codes, negating the need for manual documentation in which stationaries may be shared and allows contact tracing to be rapid in instances where a positive patient may have visited previously [23].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The prevalence and clinical significance of Presymptomatic COVID-19 patients: how we can be one step ahead in mitigating a deadly pandemic

et al. 2021

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Background Presymptomatic COVID-19 patients have been identified as a major stumbling block in efforts to break the chain of transmission. Studies on temporal dynamics of its shedding suggests it peaks 1–2 days prior to any symptom onset. Therefore, a large proportion of patients are actively spreading the disease unknowingly whilst undetected. However, lengthy lockdowns and isolation leads to a host of socioeconomic issues and are impractical. Conversely, there exists no study describing this group and their clinical significance despite their key role in disease transmission. Methods As a result, we devised a retrospective study to look at the prevalence of presymptomatic patients with COVID-19 from data sourced via our medical records office. Subsequently, we identify early indicators of infection through demographic information, biochemical and radiological abnormalities which would allow early diagnosis and isolation. In addition, we will look into the clinical significance of this group and their outcome; if it differs from asymptomatic or symptomatic patients. Descriptive statistics were used in addition to tabulating the variables and corresponding values for reference. Variables are compared between the presymptomatic group and others via Chi-square testing and Fisher’s exact test, accepting a p value of < 0.05 as significant. Results Our analysis shows a higher proportion of presymptomatic patients with atypical symptoms like chest pain while symptomatic patients commonly present with respiratory symptoms like cough and shortness of breath. Besides that, there were more females presenting as presymptomatic patients compared to males (p = 0.019) and these group of patients were likely to receive treatment (p < 0.001). Otherwise, we were not able to identify other statistically significant markers suggesting a patient is presymptomatic. Conclusion As we have little means of identifying these silent spreaders, it highlights further the importance of general measures implemented to stop COVID-19 transmission like social distancing, face mask, and widespread testing.

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“…This methodology could be integrated into already popular health and fitness tracking apps without requiring any additional input from the user (except skin type), while providing them with specifically tailored recommendations, which research [55] has shown to be more effective than the kind of general advice provided to but not always adhered to by users of existing apps [30,56]. Such an app might be thought of as similar to COVID tracing apps, in that privacy concerns about location tracking may affect uptake despite the important health implications, but a minimal burden on the user is nonetheless important for ensuring high rates of app uptake [57,58] and is a key advantage of our approach going forward.…”

Section: What Are the Key Avenues For Future Research?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Satellite-Based Personal UV Dose Estimation

et al. 2021

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Epidemiology and public health research relating to solar ultraviolet (UV) exposure usually relies on dosimetry to measure UV doses received by individuals. However, measurement errors affect each dosimetry measurement by unknown amounts, complicating the analysis of such measurements and their relationship to the underlying population exposure and the associated health outcomes. This paper presents a new approach to estimate UV doses without the use of dosimeters. By combining new satellite-derived UV data to account for environmental factors and simulation-based exposure ratio (ER) modelling to account for individual factors, we are able to estimate doses for specific exposure periods. This is a significant step forward for alternative dosimetry techniques which have previously been limited to annual dose estimation. We compare our dose estimates with dosimeter measurements from skiers and builders in Switzerland. The dosimetry measurements are expected to be slightly below the true doses due to a variety of dosimeter-related measurement errors, mostly explaining why our estimates are greater than or equal to the corresponding dosimetry measurements. Our approach holds much promise as a low-cost way to either complement or substitute traditional dosimetry. It can be applied in a research context, but is also fundamentally well-suited to be used as the basis for a dose-estimating mobile app that does not require an external device.

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A Tale of Two Contact-Tracing Apps – Comparing Australia’s COVIDSafe and New Zealand’s NZ COVID Tracer

Cited by 11 publications

References 11 publications

New Zealand's COVID‐19 elimination strategy

New Zealand's COVID‐19 elimination strategy

The prevalence and clinical significance of Presymptomatic COVID-19 patients: how we can be one step ahead in mitigating a deadly pandemic

Satellite-Based Personal UV Dose Estimation

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