How to augment Manual Contact Tracing with Digital Contact Advice (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED Manual contact tracing is a top-down solution that starts with contact tracers at the public health level, who identify the contacts of infected individuals, interview them to get additional context about the exposure, and also monitor their symptoms and support them until the incubation period is past. On the other hand, digital contact tracing is a bottom-up solution that starts with citizens who on obtaining a notification about possible exposure to an infected individual may choose to ignore the notification, get tested to determine if they were actually exposed or self-isolate and monitor their symptoms over the next two weeks. Most experts recommend a combination of manual and digital contact tracing, though they are limited published studies to guide implementation. One possible hybrid solution digital and manual contact tracing could involve a smartphone based alert that requests the possible contact of an infected individual to call Public Health (PH) for next steps, or that suggests ways to self-assess in order to reduce the burden on PH by only advising the most critical cases to call. In this paper, we aim to compare manual and digital approaches to contact tracing and provide suggestions for potential hybrid solutions.