UCSC professor helps develop COVID-19 tracing app

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (KION) There is new technology that's been developed that could be the next best way to flatten the coronavirus curve. UCSC economics professor, Kristian Lopez Vargas, helped create a contact tracing app to protect people from COVID-19 exposure in his native country of Peru.

The app, PeruEnTusManos, was launched April 3 and already has one million users. Lopez Vargas and a team of about 40 others launched the app for Peruvians, but similar technology is being developed here in the U.S.

“Of course you don’t remember everywhere you’ve been and everyone that’s been nearby you, and that’s a big problem,” Lopez Vargas said.

Users voluntarily opt in and submit information anonymously to a central database, where risk assessments are made automatically. The app alerts others who had come in contact with, or in the same area as, someone who later became infected.

“A majority of people are asymptotic. The problem with asymptotic people is that they are doing their lives with out knowing they have the virus," Lopez Vargas said.

A database holds records of where individuals have been over the last 14 days so if someone tests positive for coronavirus, it can be traced.

Several universities in the U.S. like MIT, Stanford and Harvard are developing similar tools, but for privacy concerns, their contact tracing technology will virtually have no central database.

“That brings other challenges because with less centralized information there is also less room for real time monitoring of the pandemic,” Lopez Vargas said.

The UCSC professor said this technology is developing extremely quickly, and some forms of local government here could begin adopting this advanced tracing.