August 18, 2020

expert reaction to Cochrane rapid review of digital contact tracing technologies

The Cochrane Collaboration have published* a rapid review on the effectiveness of digital contact tracing technologies during infectious disease outbreaks.

Dr Joshua Moon, research fellow in the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School, said:

“Little of the findings of the Cochrane’s rapid review on digital contact tracing is overly surprising but the report does reinforce something that has been said by many folks before: digital contact tracing is supplemental to manual contact tracing and not a single silver bullet.

“Access is key to ensuring that digital solutions work, as is compliance with isolation on the part of contacts.

“Pandemic response requires a whole range of activities, and will not be solved by a single app.”

Prof Michael Hopkins, Professor of Innovation Management at the University of Sussex Business School, said:

“The study reveals surprisingly little is known about the effectiveness of digital contact tracing technologies. These may have some added utility combined with manual tracing, as they could help trace chains of infection where contacts didn’t know each other, for example if they were next to each other on a bus. However, evaluation of tracing apps is difficult as they are often part of a system of other measures (like manual contact tracing).

“Also, we can’t say what the added value of digital contact tracing is. This is particularly an issue with DP-3T apps as used by google/apple because these do not report data centrally, so it’s difficult to know when they have successfully alerted those at risk of infection.

“Governments are betting that these technologies will have an impact, but they can’t be relied upon yet.

“The context for the above is that I am running an international comparative study of test and trace systems across countries including the UK, Ireland, Spain, Germany, South Africa and South Korea. More details are here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/research/projects/diagnostic-testing”

* https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD013699/full

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

None received.