The good news is, several countries in Europe – including Germany, Italy and Austria – are starting to coalesce around the Apple-Google contact-tracing technology. — Reuters
Nearly all global health officials agree that as countries plan their emergence from the pandemic lockdown, an effective Covid-19 mitigation strategy requires a comprehensive and effective contact-tracing plan, along with pervasive testing and self-isolation protocols. And so, dozens of countries around the world are scrambling to build Covid-19 contact-tracing apps – except, that is, for the United States, which has been strangely quiet on the matter. This is befuddling, especially when America’s best and brightest tech companies are offering a powerful proposal on a platter.
To much fanfare last month, Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google announced a partnership to develop technology that will enable apps from public health authorities to do contact tracing. At the time, I wrote that this unprecedented joint effort by the two giants had the promise to turn the tide against the pandemic by potentially scaling to billions of smartphone users, while protecting the public’s privacy through smart engineering.
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