The Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) is quickly becoming a global outbreak. The problem in containing clusters is that the incubation period makes it hard to trace all the interactions of who has been unknowingly carrying the virus due to lack of symptoms.

Apple, Google, Facebook track the device position and could timely and easily provide health institutions and facilities a platform that crosses historical location data of virus carriers the virus once it has been tested positive, with the people he/she could have interacted with.

They should provide access only to health institutions and facilities to flag cases and access the anonymized, aggregated data.

Example: X tests positive for CoVid19. Officials work hard to try and map his/her whereabouts. Besides the office, could have been in a mall, a sporting event, a concert. Google Maps could help there, but it's impossible to map all the people who were with X. It would also an impossible task, with high privacy risks, to manually map the whereabouts of those who have then themselves been carrying the virus. In some affected parts of the world they are doing this and exposing personal data, which is not acceptable.

With a specifically dedicated tool/platform, it would be as simple as flagging X's accounts as positive (via ad-hoc generated device ID, no PII involved), and let big data do the rest. No personal data will be shared, not unlike how Live Traffic works (you get the road status and at the same time contribute to a more precise traffic mapping, but you are completely anonymous).

Once the device is flagged as "positive", this would trigger a message on all the devices that have come in close proximity in the days since the infection has likely happened (as defined by the medical staff) based on a risk profile. The "positive" flag should only be set by health officials in order to avoid system abuse. The platform would be completely anonymised (opt-in possibly required).

Once a risk threshold is reached an alert is received and the user would be informed of the risk and guided for the proper actions to take by their Apple/Google/Facebook apps via notification.The user would be assisted in checking a list of symptoms to better be guided on what to do and who to contact (based on the current location).

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE SUCH A TOOL WOULD BE USED TO LIMIT ONE'S FREEDOM. IT WILL BE AN INFORMATION-BASED PLATFORM RELYING ON ANONYMITY AND RESPONSIBILITY TO INSTRUCT PEOPLE ON TAKING THE PROPER ACTIONS AND HELPING TRACK THE SPREAD.

This platform would:

- help containing the spread of the virus

- help officials target more precisely the deployment of tests to identify clusters since there could likely be a shortage of testing kits in case of a more severe outbreak

- allow for a more precise tracking of where to expect a community outbreak by creating risk heat maps 

The system would need to be precisely calibrated to avoid both false positive alerts and unnecessary worry. Support from the scientific community would be crucial to develop the risk assessment profile, support from the tech community would be necessary to precisely map the proximity according to the type of interaction, duration and type of location. The delivery would reach mobile users through a simple app/system update. 

Once a system like this is developed, could be used for further disease mapping beyond CoVid19.