The smart quarantine project will be extended to the whole country from Monday.
The project involves tracing past contacts of people who test positive for the virus five days back by creating “maps of their movements” with the help of banks and mobile phone operators.
The solution offered by the Covid19cz group of computer experts. “It generates a memory map showing… for instance that a man spent half an hour at the corner of two streets,” sais Covid19cz spokeswoman Irena Zatloukalova.
“The public health officer can ask if the person visited or met someone to identify other people who may be infected. People won´t have to merely rely on their memory when they recall what they were doing over the last two weeks.”
All those who they came into contact with are tested and quarantined until cleared. The plan is being implemented with the help of the army in order to speed up testing.
The smart quarantine will contribute to the acceleration of activities ensuring population testing and identify new coronavirus cases.
Those who test positive will then describe who they met and where to the Regional Hygiene Authority, and a map will be drawn from this information.
Within three days, everyone who was in contact with the infected person will be contacted. “They will be ordered into a short-term quarantine and the army will arrive within a few hours,” explained Prymula.
“During the first stage of the fight against Coronavirus, across-the-board measures were adopted to stop the virus from spreading unchecked. Fortunately, we did this quickly. It looks as though we have high a chance of levelling out the growth and the curve. We have now moved on to the second stage, which entails replacing the across-the-board measures with the smart-quarantine concept that has been used with success in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and other countries,” said Prime Minister Andrej Babiš noted.
On the orders of the government, all data must be permanently deleted after the research has been completed, according to Ondřej Tomáš, one of the system developers. Only epidemiologists will be allowed to access the data.
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