Comparing manual contact tracing and digital contact advice

TL;DR

This paper compares manual and digital contact tracing methods, analyzing their strengths and limitations, and explores potential hybrid solutions to improve contact tracing effectiveness during infectious disease outbreaks.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of manual and digital contact tracing approaches and proposes hybrid strategies based on their combined strengths.

Findings

Manual contact tracing offers detailed contact information but is labor-intensive.

Digital contact tracing enables rapid notifications but may have lower compliance.

Hybrid solutions can optimize resource use and improve tracing efficiency.

Abstract

Manual contact tracing is a top-down solution that starts with contact tracers at the public health level, who identify the contacts of infected individuals, interview them to get additional context about the exposure, and also monitor their symptoms and support them until the incubation period is passed. On the other hand, digital contact tracing is a bottom-up solution that starts with citizens who on obtaining a notification about possible exposure to an infected individual may choose to ignore the notification, get tested to determine if they were actually exposed or self-isolate and monitor their symptoms over the next two weeks. Most experts recommend a combination of manual contact tracing and digital contact advice but they are not based on a scientific basis. For example, a possible hybrid solution could involve a smartphone based alert that requests the possible contact of an infected individual to call the Public Health (PH) number for next steps, or in some cases, suggest ways to self-assess in order to reduce the burden on PH so only most critical cases require a phone conversation. In this paper, we aim to compare the manual and digital approaches to contact tracing and provide suggestions for potential hybrid solutions.