Member, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Barcelona, Spain.
Secretaría de Estado de Digitalización e Inteligencia Artificial (SEDIA), Secretaría General de Administración Digital, Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital, Madrid, Spain.
Nat Commun. 2021 Jan 26;12(1):587. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-20817-6.
While Digital contact tracing (DCT) has been argued to be a valuable complement to manual tracing in the containment of COVID-19, no empirical evidence of its effectiveness is available to date. Here, we report the results of a 4-week population-based controlled experiment that took place in La Gomera (Canary Islands, Spain) between June and July 2020, where we assessed the epidemiological impact of the Spanish DCT app Radar Covid. After a substantial communication campaign, we estimate that at least 33% of the population adopted the technology and further showed relatively high adherence and compliance as well as a quick turnaround time. The app detects about 6.3 close-contacts per primary simulated infection, a significant percentage being contacts with strangers, although the spontaneous follow-up rate of these notified cases is low. Overall, these results provide experimental evidence of the potential usefulness of DCT during an epidemic outbreak in a real population.
虽然数字接触者追踪（DCT）被认为是控制 COVID-19 中人工追踪的有价值的补充手段，但目前尚无其有效性的经验证据。在这里，我们报告了 2020 年 6 月至 7 月在加那利群岛拉戈梅拉（西班牙）进行的为期 4 周的基于人群的对照实验的结果，我们评估了西班牙 DCT 应用程序 Radar Covid 的流行病学影响。在一次大规模的宣传活动之后，我们估计至少有 33%的人口采用了这项技术，并且还表现出相对较高的坚持性和合规性，以及快速的反应时间。该应用程序每例主要模拟感染检测到约 6.3 名密切接触者，其中很大一部分是与陌生人的接触者，尽管这些被通知病例的自发随访率较低。总的来说，这些结果为在真实人群中爆发疫情期间 DCT 的潜在有用性提供了实验证据。
