Methods of Contact Tracing In Different Countries

How is Contact Tracing Conducted?

Contact tracing is used by health departments to prevent the spread of infectious disease. In general, contact tracing involves identifying people who have an infectious disease (cases) and people who they came in contact with (contacts) and working with them to interrupt disease spread. This includes asking people to isolate and their contacts to quarantine at home voluntarily. Contacts are also asked to monitor their symptoms daily, e.g., temperature checks, self-assessments based on common symptoms, and to get tested if any symptoms develop during their isolation.

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- Isolate and quarantine by transformed public facilities and retreat centers owned by private corporations into temporary isolation wards to care for COVID-19 patients while preventing transmission within households, and to relieve hospitals of bed shortages
- A government epidemiological investigation of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, at the origin of a large contagion cluster in the city of Daegu
- Intense and compulsory contact tracing
- Strict digital monitoring of quarantines, with fines and prison terms to deter violators
- Entry bans limited to Chinese nationals with a passport issued from Hubei province and anyone who has visited Hubei province within the past 14 days
- The government intervened in the production and market of masks and other PPE's to minimize the problems of shortage and hoarding as much as possible

South Korea's Effort to Contain Covid-19

Many existing technologies and practices have been improved and optimized for larger scale operations, including:

- Contact Tracing
- Telehealth (Telemedicine)
- Big Data
- Barriers to Collaborative COVID-19 research

Focuses of Health Information Technology and COVID-19

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). Centers for Disease control and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/. 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

What is Contact Tracing?

When necessary, the officers were permitted to draw on four major types of information in addition to patient and doctor interviews:

- Facility visits, including pharmacies and medical facilities
- Cellular GPS data from cell phones
- Credit card transaction logs
- Closed-circuit television

The South Korean Government also developed apps that collected relevant data, which eased the burden on EIS officers and made it possible for them to cope with the high volume of investigations.

Ways that South Korea has proceeded Contact Tracing Using Big Data

Updated as of July, both Korean nationals and foreign nationals are required to Install the Self-Quarantine Safety Protection App prior to entry.  Effective as of April 1st, the Republic of Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) imposed a mandatory 14-day quarantine for all inbound passengers with short-term visas.  Korean visa applications to Hubei Province will be denied.  All visa-free entry to Chinese nationals and foreign nationals traveling through China has been suspended.  Foreign nationals who break quarantine laws are subject to deportation.

Travel restrictions

An Epidemic investigation is a set of procedures used to identify the the infectious agent,responsible for the spread of a disease. The bellow steps outline the process of investigating an outbreak: 
- Prepare for field work
- Establish the existence of an outbreak
- Verify the diagnosis
- Construct a working case definition
- Find cases systematically and record information
- Perform descriptive epidemiology
- Develop hypotheses
- Evaluate hypotheses epidemiologically
- As necessary, reconsider, refine, and re-evaluate hypotheses
- Compare and reconcile with laboratory and/or environmental studies
- Implement control and prevention measures
- Initiate or maintain surveillance
- Communicate findings

Epidemiological Investigations

An amendment to the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act which took effect on April 5th of 2020 strengthened penalty maximums for violation of self-quarantine or providing intentionally inaccurate information to public health officials.  Penalties maximums are set to a fine of up to 10 million won ($8307 USD) or a prison term of up to a year.  Fines and prison sentences have been issued by courts since.

Quarantine Violation Penalties

South Korean Security forces were not deployed in quarantine prevention.  It is notable that very little force nor show of force was used in containment.

Security Forces Not Deployed

Personal Protect Equipment is an important method for virus containment.  South Korea briefly placed a ban on the exportation of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) following shortages on such supplies.  During this time, the government took full control of PPE production, logistics, and distribution.  Mask prices were fixed at 1,500 won ($1.27 USD), sales were limited two per person, every other day.  South Korea is not the only nation to have implemented such measures.  To date, there are no documented South Korean hospitals which were forced to reuse PPE.  Public response to such measures was mixed.

Covid-19 Containment in South Korea Through Personal Protective Equipment Management

Telehealth are health-related services and information through electronic communication technologies to help patients with or people influenced by COVID-19. It allows long-distance patient and clinician care, education, and monitoring. Telemedicine is sometimes used as a synonym, or is used in a more limited sense to describe remote clinical services, such as diagnosis and monitoring. 

Telehealth (telemedicine) and COVID-19

- Time-consuming to self-judge many rapidly released papers
- Difficult to efficiently inform the research community about inappropriate results/findings
- Repetition and contradiction
- Cognitive overload and determining the novelty of a new study
- Published papers are static and don't get updated dynamically
- Difficult for multidisciplinary research collaboration 
- The increased role of preprint servers in COVID-19 research
- Marketing and subscription fees of journals
- Personal ambitions and carrier incentives
- Even the papers published journals are not completely flawless when the time is the essence.
- Difficulty informing the public


Current Barriers Related to COVID-19 Collaborative Research

Many countries are using social media as a way to guide the general public through this pandemic. These forums (such as WhatsApp in Singapore) can help the government provide easily accessible updates and guidelines in each stage of the virus as it impacts society. 

Social Media and COVID-19

This can be done via contact tracing as people adapt to the "new normal".  This allows  clinical personnel to recognize infection hotspots and notify personnel of of possible new cases. This method is used to slow down and the pandemic and plauteau the curve.

Digital Monitoring

Big data is a field that analyze data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data-processing application software or manpower. In the pandemic of Covid-19, many countries have turned to this field to minimize the impact of the pandemic by analyzing and evaluating the possibility of certain people to be infected. Hospitals and care facilities can then be alerted beforehand, and the likelihood of an undetected outbreak is reduced.

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