Articles: coronavirus.
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JMIR mHealth and uHealth · Apr 2020
Peer-to-Peer Contact Tracing: Development of a Privacy-Preserving Smartphone App.
The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is an urgent public health crisis, with epidemiologic models predicting severe consequences, including high death rates, if the virus is permitted to run its course without any intervention or response. Contact tracing using smartphone technology is a powerful tool that may be employed to limit disease transmission during an epidemic or pandemic; yet, contact tracing apps present significant privacy concerns regarding the collection of personal data such as location. ⋯ Our proposed smartphone-based contact tracing method presents a novel solution that preserves privacy while demonstrating the potential to suppress an epidemic or pandemic outbreak. This app could potentially be applied to the current COVID-19 pandemic as well as other epidemics or pandemics in the future to achieve a middle ground between drastic isolation measures and unmitigated disease spread.
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The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused more than 80 813 confirmed cases in all provinces of China, and 21 110 cases reported in 93 countries of six continents as of 7 March 2020 since middle December 2019. Due to biological nature of the novel coronavirus, named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) with faster spreading and unknown transmission pattern, it makes us in a difficulty position to contain the disease transmission globally. ⋯ In order to prevent a potential pandemic-level outbreak of COVID-19, we, as a community of shared future for mankind, recommend for all international leaders to support preparedness in low and middle income countries especially, take strong global interventions by using old approaches or new tools, mobilize global resources to equip hospital facilities and supplies to protect noisome infections and to provide personal protective tools such as facemask to general population, and quickly initiate research projects on drug and vaccine development. We also recommend for the international community to develop better coordination, cooperation, and strong solidarity in the joint efforts of fighting against COVID-19 spreading recommended by the joint mission report of the WHO-China experts, against violating the International Health Regulation (WHO, 2005), and against stigmatization, in order to eventually win the battle against our common enemy - COVID-19.