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COVID-19 digital contact tracing worked — heed the lessons for future pandemics

For all the controversy over decentralized contact-tracing apps, data show that these privacy-preserving tools saved thousands of lives during the pandemic. National and international authorities must invest in the technology now.
  1. Marcel Salathé

    1. Marcel Salathé is an associate professor and head of the Digital Epidemiology Lab, School of Life Sciences, School of Computer and Communication Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.

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A person wearing a face mask holds up two phones displaying the NHS COVID-19 contract tracing app

The National Health Service launched a digital contact-tracing app for COVID-19 in England and Wales in September 2020. Credit: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, around 50 countries deployed digital contact tracing. When someone tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, anyone who had been in close proximity to that person (usually for 15 minutes or more) would be notified as long as both individuals had installed the contact-tracing app on their devices.

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Nature 619, 31-33 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02130-6

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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