Apple and Google are building a virus tracking system. Does it really work?

During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea, global health researcher Anne Liu struggled to convince public health officials that apps and other technologies could help manage the spread of disease. To beat back the outbreak, officials had to locate every person an Ebola patient may have interacted with while they were infectious, in a process called contact tracing. Liu and her colleagues wanted investigators to use apps to compile information, rather than pen and paper. At the time, it was a hard sell.

“The fight was more, is technology going to be useful at all,” says Liu, now the senior technical advisor at the Clinton Health Access Initiative. “I don’t think that’s the battle anymore.”

Now, during the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic, some experts are turning to technology to take over the contact tracing process entirely. Countries like Singapore and China are using cellphone-based tools to identify and monitor people who might have been exposed to someone with COVID-19. The United Kingdom is building a contact tracing app, and in the United States, Google and Apple partnered to build a Bluetooth-based tracking system that can automatically log people’s interactions.