Covid-19 crisis Millions already spent on contact tracing
I read with concern the government's effort to introduce a wearable tracker and probably compel all residents to wear this device.

Many people are worried about privacy issue. It is an important concern, but I will let them pursue it.

I want to raise the concern about the cost of this national effort and the possibility of getting any useful benefit that justify the cost.

There are no figure about the cost, so I shall have to make a guess. If this is a national effort, it means that the wearable tracker has to be issued to every person.  

The cost of a fitness watch is $30. The wearable tracker may probably cost less, say $15. If this is to be issued to 6 million residents, the cost will be $90 million. We must add the cost of distribution - so the total project cost is likely to be $120 million.

For this project to succeed, everybody must wear the device and regularly sync it to a mobile phone. Most people have a mobile phone. If they do not they can sync the device to a mobile phone of a friend or family member. 

They sync process will allow the wearer to check against a database of infected persons. If the wearer has been in contact with an infected person, he can be notified about it.

The law will probably require the wearer to report to a health authority and be placed on quarantine.

The problem is that some people will not wear the tracker or they will not charge the tracker, so it will not be collect the contact data. 

This project can succeed only if there is a high degree of social discipline and everybody play their part by charging the device and sync it to a mobile phone for checking the database at regular intervals.

I am afraid that, in practice, there will be a high degree of non-compliance that make their project ineffective. 

Rather than take this risk of a new project, I suggest that the government should make proper use of the data that is already collected by the Safe Entry operation.

This exercise must be costing the country a few tens of million dollars every month. It does collect the data of people who visit tens of thousand locations every day. 

If the safe entry data of infected persons are tracked against the safe entry data of other people in the database, it should be possible to identify the people who could be potentially infected. These are the people who checked in at the same location around the same time.

This may not catch every potentially infected people, but it should catch a large number. The potentially infected people could be alerted.

At the very least, we should try to make use of the available data, rather than create a new and expensive platform. 

Let us now keep spending money that may be unnecessary and wasteful.

Tan Kin Lian





 

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