Contact tracing is one of the new buzzwords that has emerged out of the COVID-19 pandemic. But what is it?
Contact tracing relies on Bluetooth technology and mobile devices. Ordinarily, your phone is safe and isolated from everyone else around you’s device, but that doesn’t mean that your phone cannot detect that there are others nearby. Because of the widespread use of Bluetooth technology, a phone can detect if there is another device nearby, kind of like how it would if there is a wifi signal within range.
Now, imagine that someone with COVID-19 has their phone with them in public. If your device was near that person’s, your phone would detect their’s. If there was some sort of way to know whose devices you had been near, you could look at a list of the people that you passed by in close distance throughout the course of a day. If one of those people had the virus, there’s a chance that you could have caught it, and because of contact tracing, you would know that you need to be cautious until you are cleared and deemed healthy.
It’s certainly not a perfect process, but it is a big step toward improving public health during this time. In a situation like this, having this information at your disposal can ensure that you keep yourself and your family safe. It can even save lives.
For many, contact tracing seems like a huge invasion of privacy. And while this is a legitimate fear, invading your privacy is not the primary goal of contact tracing. The goal is to help keep people safe by alerting them if they have been near someone that has tested positive for COVID-19. When effective contact tracing has occurred, those that need it can seek out treatment more quickly and isolate themselves immediately so that they are not in danger of spreading the disease themselves. There’s certainly the potential for this technology to be abused, but at this point, there is no evidence to believe that this is happening.
Here at Paradise In-Home Care, we take the safety of your family members very seriously. We have taken every precaution possible to ensure that the people we work with–and our employees–are kept as safe as possible during this time. And many of the practices that we’ve incorporated during this time are likely to stick around. While the conditions that the pandemic has caused have certainly been difficult to adopt, there are also a lot of new best practices emerging when it comes to senior safety.
Please give us a call if you’d like to learn more about the care we provide and what we do. One of our trained caregivers would love to speak with you and help you to determine how in-home care might benefit your family. This is a tough time to be looking for senior care, so we aim to make this process as easy and pain-free as possible. All it takes is a short call to get the ball rolling. We look forward to speaking with you.
Leave a Reply