Most people, unless you work either for government or an infectious disease âorganizationâ (non-profit, hospital, health care system) probably had not heard the phrase âcontact tracingâ until a month or so ago.
I now hear and see the phrase âcontact tracingâ everywhere.
About a month ago, as I started working on Covid-related stuff, the phrase came up regularly on the private side as a partial solution to the problem of âopening things back up.â It was often phrased as âit will be hard to open anything up until we have enough testing and contact tracing.â
For about a week, I couldnât figure out why many of the people I was interacting with seemed to dismiss my ideas and concerns about contact tracing. Then, in a conversation, someone in government explained what the governmentâs historical view of contact tracing was, which is a well-defined and regularly executed completely manual process.
A giant lightbulb went off in my brain as I realized two things were happening. A bunch of people who were hearing the phrase âcontact tracingâ figured âyup â weâve got that under controlâ (meaning they already had a manual contact tracing effort in place or about to be launched). The rest were thinking âthe tech people want to automate and digitize the manual contact tracing activity â thatâll never work and itâll create huge security and data privacy issues.â
So, I, along with everyone I am working with, started calling it âDigital Contact Tracing.â That helped some, especially as we described its relationship to Manual Contact Tracing. But, there was still too much explanation of Manual Contact Tracing vs. Digital Contact Tracing. And, confused continued to abound.
The phrase âDigital Contact Tracingâ started evolving. The ACLU wrote a great white paper titled Principles for Technology-Assisted-Contact-Tracing which generated a clever acronym (TACT). I also saw the phrase âDigital Contact Tracing and Alertingâ being used.
Yesterday, Harper Reed put up a short post titled Digital Contact Tracing and Alerting vs Exposure Alerting that lays out the history of the concept and renames it âExposure Alerting.â
Exposure Alerting is the correct phrase for Digital Contact Tracing. It is clearly additive to Manual Contact Tracing (or simply Contact Tracing as most of the non-technical world refers to it.)
So, from here on out, I think we should call this activity Exposure Alerting. I think we would have saved a lot of time and energy if we had come up with the right name from the beginning. But, since this is going to be with us for a very long time, letâs start now.