OTTAWA — Federal and provincial health officials are recruiting small armies of staff and examining technology options such as cell phone location data as they ramp up Canada’s capacity to do contact tracing.
Contact tracing involves searching out recent contacts of anyone who’s tested positive for COVID-19, and monitoring those contacts for symptoms and the potential need for testing and self-isolating. It’s key to stopping an uncontrolled outbreak in a community.
Canada is still in its “first wave” of infections, and officials have said the best course of action for now is to have everyone stay home. But once the first wave fully subsides — likely sometime in the summer — extensive testing and contact tracing should allow Canada to start re-opening its economy and lift some of the physical-distancing restrictions.
“As we get this first wave under control, the absolute key is having sensitive systems to detect any new cases and then to do rigorous contact tracing around those cases,” said Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, on Friday.
Tam said provincial health agencies are responsible for their own contact-tracing programs, but the federal government is coordinating support measures.
A huge challenge is simply having the staff resources to do all the phone calls and follow-up monitoring. Provinces have been doing callouts to medical students and retired health-care workers, but the federal government is also pulling together a national database for provinces to tap into.
The Public Health Agency of Canada said this includes assigning some federal civil servants to help provinces who need the extra staff.
“The first stage was to enlist qualified federal public servants, who are currently not in roles essential to ongoing federal work, to work in those jurisdictions feeling the most pressure,” said a statement to the National Post.
The second stage includes a volunteer recruitment campaign and “reaching out to faculties of health, public health, and science across the country to disseminate a call for interested individuals to register in the inventory,” the statement said. “A third stage will reach out to all health professional and health science associations for retirees or individuals currently not engaged in the COVID-19 response.”
Tam said they are working on a “surge” capacity of staff that can be deployed when a region sees a new outbreak. “We’ve been monitoring and forecasting so if there’s increasing cases, which then means increasing contacts, we’re there to support the surge if needed,” Tam said.
Technology will also play an increasingly important role in contact tracing, but Canadian health officials are still deliberating over the best course of action. Cell phone location data is central to this discussion, and has been put to use in other countries such as Singapore , but it also raises thorny questions about privacy.
“I think that is an area of great interest to every jurisdiction,” Tam said. “There are many, many innovators with lots of different ideas, so we are pulling together a group among the provinces and territories to gauge interest.”
She said that along with contact tracing, technology could be used to send reminder alerts about how to properly self-isolate.
“We need to look at each of those innovations in particular as it pertains to things like privacy,” she said.
An example of the type of sweeping technology power that could be put to use was announced on Friday by Apple and Google, the respective makers of iPhone and Android operating systems.
“Google and Apple are announcing a joint effort to enable the use of Bluetooth technology to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of the virus, with user privacy and security central to the design,” said a statement from the companies.
The technology would eventually allow users to opt-in to be notified if they’ve crossed paths with someone who’s tested positive for COVID-19. “Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders,” the companies said.
There has already been an ongoing debate in Canada as privacy and civil liberties advocates debate what measures may be necessary, and how to judge when a line has been crossed.
“We’re sometimes inclined to think of the word ‘surveillance’ as always bad, but of course it is not,” said a recent post by Brenda McPhail at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association . But she said the use of digital data to fight COVID-19 must still be “proportionate and minimally intrusive for the humans whose health is at the core of the data collection efforts — even if the proportionality analysis may look a little different during a pandemic.”
Michael Geist, a digital privacy expert at the University of Ottawa, said in a recent post on his website that “all measures can and should be considered in response to the global pandemic,” but policy-makers must ensure there are safeguards including strict limits on data retention and clear limitations on use.
“Perhaps most importantly, these powers must be temporary in nature, requiring parliamentary approval for short term use and regular renewals as events warrant,” he wrote.
