Local scientists have developed a mobile phone application that can record places users - including confirmed Covid-19 patients, have visited in the past 14 days and close contacts of the patients using Bluetooth and QR codes. They are from the research team at the Hong Kong Baptist University’s Department of Computer Science, who values the importance of contact tracing in lowering the transmission of coronavirus. Xu Jianliang, associate head and professor at the university’s Department of Computer Science, said that contact tracing via conventional methods are relatively inconvenient as they rely on patient’s recollection. Xu said that the team’s application will carry out contact tracing in two modes. He admitted that the system has a loophole - it will not be able to track down close contacts of confirmed Covid-19 patients if the latter do not report that they have been infected.

Source: The Standard August 31, 2020 09:00 UTC