UK researchers develop infection tracking app

Researchers at the University of Oxford are working with the UK government on an app similar to the smartphone tracking system China developed to alert people who have come in contact with someone infected with the coronavirus. The British app, which would be associated with the country's National Health Service,, would rely on the public volunteering to share their location data out of a sense of civic duty rather than, as in China, compulsion. The service would not publish the movements of infected individuals, as South Korea has. Even without universal adoption, and even though location data is not always precise, the Oxford researchers believe, based on their models, that such a system could be helpful and much faster than older methods of contact tracing. 

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/coronavirus-location-tracking.html
 

Writer: Jennifer Valentino-DeVries
Publication: New York Times