COVID-19: Bridging health services

Over the last few weeks, we have been actively working on finding the best way of confirming infections.

If anyone can self-report as infected, then the service will open the door to misuse. False alerts will generate a lot of anxiety, thus increasing the number of people looking to be tested, adding more pressure on health services already under intense pressure. Misuse must be prevented.

Only health services can positively confirm an infection. To reduce the interaction between users and health services, we propose to ask the mobile application users to scan the barcode (for NHS) of their COVID-19 test, at sample collection time.

The bar code contains an id that can then be used to retrieve the test result from NHS servers. If the test comes back positive (abnormal), then the user is invited to disclose its Bluetooth identifiers to its authority, and help to protect others.