COVID-19: Improved authority bridging: maximised impact

COVID-19 spread has been largely fuelled by travelling people and led to the lockdown measures we know today. Once those measures are relaxed, people will start travelling again. Applications developed by national authorities are likely to only treat of locally infected users, allowing only partial computation of infection risks.

The authority-to-authority bridge we are building allows collaboration of all national health authorities. One option is to share all infected user's identifiers to create a global diffusion list which would cover all infection risk due to travelling, but this would tremendously increase the volume of data that needs to be regularly downloaded by all users.

Our initial proposition was to gather the relevant authorities to notify, based on users disclosing this information to our secure (encrypted) service.

We are improving this mechanism by using GPS data, detecting in which national authority boundaries the user is. Our mobile application is open-source: everyone will be able to verify that GPS data only serves this purpose and is not used for contact-tracing.

This will allow travelling people to automatically pull infected user's identifiers lists from all the authorities they have visited. When reported as infected, our app will notify all the user's visited authorities. This system has the advantage of being fully automated, reducing the burden on already overstretched health authorities.

Watching the various efforts currently made by the community and carefully reviewing the advantages and pitfalls of each, we feel that we are now close to a comprehensive final proposal and expect to release our technical paper soon.