Digital Herd Immunity and COVID-19

Vir Bannerjee Bulchandani; Saumya Shivam; Sanjay Moudgalya; S L Sondhi

Population-level testing is not possible today, but perhaps with major advances in pooled testing this may be possible not too long from now, at least for populations in countries with the requisite health care infrastructure. Traditional contact tracing, done by teams of health officials relying on interviews with newly identified cases, is also not up to the task today, as it fails if non-symptomatic transmission is too frequent [3, 4] . Fortunately, we live in the smartphone era, and it has been noted that using these devices to record contacts can make the task of tracing them entirely solvable by automating it. This idea has been spelled out in a series of papers [5, 6] and is the basis for a rapidly expanding set of contact-tracing apps and the recent announcement by the Apple-Google duopoly of their intention to build the technology into their operating systems [7] . We note that the possibility of using mobile networks to study disease dynamics has been explored in the past [8] [9] [10] .