SUMMARY
Telecom services provider will help monitor people advised to stay under quarantine
Smartphone-based tracking has worked in countries such as Taiwan and South Korea
Indian startups are also working on a similar platform to help the government bodies
With each passing day, startups and governments are coming up with tech solutions to combat coronavirus and the issues arising out of it. Now, the Andhra Pradesh government has adopted “Covid Alerting Tracking System” to keep track of over 25K individuals advised to self-quarantine.
The app is developed by the State Disaster Management Authority, who has also collected the database associated with the mobile numbers of the people advised to stay under quarantine. The tracking system allows the government to keep a tab on the real-time location of such cases with the help of telecom service providers.
The app will be taking the person’s residence as the base location, and will alert the district authorities whenever the person is traveling beyond a 100M radius from the base location. Then authorities contact the violator and if they do not follow instructions and return to the base location, strict action is taken.
Meanwhile, almost 70 Indian startup ecosystem stakeholders are also developing the “Quarantine App” to keep a check on all such cases. The app too will rely on location tracking and also allow the people who have returned from abroad to declare themselves as quarantined through the app. Besides this, the app will also send out notifications and updates related to coronavirus in vernacular languages.
The entrepreneurial community is also working on solutions to other problems — developing quarantine infrastructure, data-driven analysis and models for India, supply chain management of essential products, and developing a healthcare capacity for stage three or community transmission of coronavirus.
Telcos Join To Help
Besides this, the government of Andhra Pradesh is also taking additional help from telecom service providers to track the travel history of all the people tested positive. As soon as a person is tested positive, the authorities ask the service providers to provide a list of all local locations the person has previously travelled to.
This allows the government to track up to 15 locations, where the patient spent more than 15 minutes before testing positive. As a precautionary measure, the government set up a red zone within 2-3 Km radius and sanitise these areas. The authorities have mapped out previous locations of over 20 such cases.
As per an India Today report, the government of Telangana, Bihar and Odisha are also looking to incorporate these tools as their tracking system.
