Contact-Tracing Approaches to Fight Covid-19 Pandemic: Limits and Ethical Challenges

COVID-19 pandemic is the largest worldwide sanitary and economical crisis of modern time. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the new corona virus is spreading rapidly from person to person through contact transmission. To fight the COVID-19 outbreak, a number of strategies have been implemented at the population level, such as social distancing, testing and contact tracing. In this work, we focus on contact tracing, which is considered an effective public health measure to control the spread of this disease by identifying and tracking potential persons who may have been in contact with a COVID-19 infected person. To this end, we review various approaches and existing contact tracing applications used by various governments around the world to monitor and control the spread of this disease. Then, we discuss the limits and ethical issues of such digital contact tracing solutions.