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There are few silver bullets in life, and pandemic control is no exception. But contact tracing may join social distancing, therapeutics, and the eventual vaccine to interdict the coronavirus and mitigate its impacts. There may be privacy-protective ways to do it. The American can-do spirit, our pro-technology outlook, and our fierce belief in rights may make contact tracing part of a balanced and effective pandemic control system. The Apple/Google contact tracing program looks good. Rewarding users of it may make it great.

For a time, the experiences of Singapore and South Korea seemed to make contact tracing the top response to coronavirus. Both were lucky enough early enough to use testing and contact tracing effectively. South Korea had the benefit, such as it is, of a super-spreader who provided something like one-stop shopping for tracing down exposed people. Singapore has seen mixed success over time, as it reported a new record number of cases this week.

The United States had cases pouring in from both Asia and Europe before anyone in a position to do something about them realized the need. And the US was distinctly poor on getting testing underway.

So its probably too late for contact tracing to work in the US as it did in the smaller, faster-acting countries. So said Steve Davies, Head of Education at the Institute for Economic Affairs in a recent Bruno Leoni Institute webinar, which is even more interesting for the broader historical view of pandemics he provides. My AEI colleague Scott Gottlieb was co-author of a paper out last week dismissing app-based contract tracing, saying cell phone-based apps recording proximity events between individuals are unlikely to have adequate discriminating ability or adoption to achieve public health utility, while introducing serious privacy, security, and logistical concerns.

But we do have a can-do, pro-tech attitude around here. Apple and Google have joined together to produce a system that can alert people of exposure to coronavirus in a way that sharply reduces their risk of exposure to general surveillance.

The technical specifications are too inscrutable to translate into English with precision (or for me to calculate privacy consequences down to the last). But the basic idea is that phones would discover each other using Bluetooth and share randomized codes representing the encounter. Such codes would not include information about who held the phone or where the phone was, simply that the two phones met. If the owner of one of the phones received a positive coronavirus diagnosis afterward, he or she could instruct an app on the phone to relay codes from the relevant time period to a server that would in turn share them with all phones in that part of the world. The information would be meaningless to all but the phones that recognized the encoded earlier meeting. Thus, people would be alerted to past contact with someone that was later diagnosed with coronavirus.

On Monday, Axios reported that the system will allowhealth authorities to provide users proof of a diagnosis. Passed along, such proofswouldcontrol whether the broadcast server distributes codes. Thats essential because false alerts could burden the system and bury public confidence.

For a system like this to provide significant benefits, it must see widespread use. A diagnosis confirmationcode could help with that. Let entry of that code and sharing of contact data with the diagnosis server qualify the holder of the phone for a payout (once only) of a few hundred dollars. People would be spurred to use the app by the prospect of a cash bonus at a time when we know they would need it.

Much discussion of contact tracing has turned on whether acute data surveillance for public health purposes squares with the Fourth Amendment. The touchstone, of course, is whether its reasonable to seize and search peoples data to get a certain increment of information about the spread of disease. Thats essentially impossible to know when we know so little about contagiousness, fatality rates, immunity, and so on.

Buying data in the way Ive suggested here would elidethose impossible questions. Or, perhaps it would answer them by gatheringinductively what is a reasonable inducement to share information. In any event,it would provide support for victims of the coronavirus. It turns out there aresilver bullets after all.

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Fighting the COVID-19 pandemic with Big Tech, apps, and money - American Enterprise Institute