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Bloomberg
At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, contact tracing was considered the best hope for getting people back to offices and schools safely without a vaccine. The tech industry was optimistic that apps would provide a faster, more effective alternative to
the usual painstaking human process of calling and interviewing the networks of infected people to figure out possible sources of exposure.
It hasn’t worked out that way. All efforts in the US are so nascent that Citizen, known for location-based crime alerts, launched a feature called SafePass that it’s already calling the largest private contact-tracing network, with only 700,000 people testing its product. The app allows users to upload their health status every day, then updates them on how many people they have walked past who are also using the
product. If someone in the network is infected, that person will be immediately notified, as will the other SafePass users their phone pinged.