Pranab Chakraborty - Contact Tracing in Post-Covid World: A Cryptologic Approach

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We live in an age where exponential possibilities and shifting sands of uncertainties constantly redefine the new normal. This time, its COVID-19 that is controlling the playing field. Optimists will hope for a post-Covid world, while the rest, perhaps, will settle down to live with it for a long time, if not forever.

Given the pandemic nature of the infection and the high mortality rate associated with it, the world is facing an unprecedented challenge of tackling the disease at scale. On one hand, the people who are suffering from COVID-19 must have the best possible medical care and treatment, on the other hand, it is of utmost importance to ensure that the least number of uninfected people should come in close contact with the ones who are infectious. Moreover, an asymptomatic person may never know that he/she is infected (and possibly infectious), unless he/she is tested. At the same time, if it is known that a person is infected, then non-infected persons (other than the immediate family members and healthcare professionals) should be kept away from the infected person. It should be feasible to achieve this through the mobile phone network, software systems and tools and appropriate policies, processes and assumptions. The communication among the neighboring mobile phones can be achieved through the bluetooth protocol, while the location and other relevant information may be transmitted to some centralized authority through the mobile network.

Here, we assume that in the majority of circumstances, a person would choose to inform in case he/she is infected or in case he/she feels that he/she might have passed the infection to someone else. The other assumption is the trust of the community on the government and/or central administrative agencies so that the personally identifiable information of an individual (whether infected or not) does not get compromised or breached. It is known that the issue of individual privacy receives more attention in certain countries than in others. Thus, political and social issues may play a dominant role in deciding how an application related to contact tracing should be designed. From a practical point of view, manual contact tracing may still remain as one of the most effective options to limit the spread of the infection. However, with remarkable development in computation and communication, it is only natural that the world will eventually move towards digital systems to handle such a global pandemic.