Could Contact-Tracing Apps Help With the Hantavirus? Not Really

接触者追踪应用能帮助应对汉坦病毒吗？其实不能

After three people died on a cruise ship struck by a hantavirus, authorities are actively tracking down 29 people who had left the ship. They’re trying to trace the spread of the virus. It’s a long, arduous, global process to find and notify people who might be at risk of infection. 在一艘爆发汉坦病毒的游轮上有三人死亡后，当局正在积极追踪 29 名已经下船的乘客。他们试图追踪病毒的传播路径。寻找并通知可能面临感染风险的人是一个漫长、艰巨且全球性的过程。

Hey, wasn’t there supposed to be an app for that? 嘿，不是应该有个应用程序能解决这个问题吗？

Contact-tracing apps were a global effort starting in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Enabled by phone companies like Apple and Google, contact tracing was designed to use Bluetooth connections to detect when people had come in contact with someone who had or would later test positive for Covid and report as much. It didn’t do much to solve the spread of the pandemic, but tracking the virus became more effective at least. The same process wouldn’t go well for the hantavirus problem. 接触者追踪应用是 2020 年新冠疫情期间的一项全球性举措。在苹果和谷歌等手机公司的支持下，接触者追踪旨在利用蓝牙连接来检测人们何时与新冠检测呈阳性（或后来呈阳性）的人有过接触，并进行上报。虽然它对解决疫情蔓延的作用有限，但至少让病毒追踪变得更加有效。然而，同样的流程并不适用于汉坦病毒的问题。

“There is no use of apps for this hantavirus outbreak,” Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an email response to WIRED. “The number of cases are small, and it’s important to trace all contacts exactly to stop transmission.” “对于这次汉坦病毒的爆发，应用程序毫无用处，”约翰霍普金斯大学的流行病学家艾米丽·格利（Emily Gurley）在回复《连线》（WIRED）的电子邮件中写道。“病例数量很少，为了阻断传播，精确追踪所有接触者至关重要。”

On a smaller scale of infection like this, officials have to start at the source (an infected individual), then go person-by-person, confirming where they went and who they might have come into contact with. Data collected by apps from a broad swath of devices would not be anywhere close to accurate enough to give a good idea of where the virus might have hitchhiked to next. 在像这样小规模的感染中，官员们必须从源头（受感染的个人）开始，然后逐人排查，确认他们的行踪以及可能接触过的人。通过应用程序从大量设备收集的数据，其准确度远不足以准确判断病毒接下来可能传播到哪里。

Contact tracing on a wider scale, like, say, a global pandemic, is less about tracking the individual infections and more about understanding what parts of the population might be affected, giving people the opportunity to self-quarantine after exposure. But that depends on how people choose to respond, and how the technology is utilized by public emergency systems. During the Covid pandemic, contact-tracing via apps tended to work better in more carefully managed European countries, but did not slow the spread in the US. 在大规模范围内（例如全球大流行）进行的接触者追踪，其重点不在于追踪个体感染，而在于了解哪些人群可能受到影响，从而让人们在暴露后有机会进行自我隔离。但这取决于人们如何选择应对，以及公共应急系统如何利用这项技术。在新冠疫情期间，通过应用程序进行的接触者追踪在管理更严格的欧洲国家往往效果更好，但在美国并没有减缓病毒的传播。

Making devices accessible to that kind of proximity information has also brought all sorts of concerns about privacy, given that the technology would require always-on access to work properly. Contact tracing also struggled to maintain accuracy, and in some cases could be providing false negatives or positives that don’t help further real information about the spread of the virus. 让设备能够获取此类近距离接触信息也引发了各种隐私担忧，因为该技术需要始终保持开启状态才能正常工作。接触者追踪在保持准确性方面也存在困难，在某些情况下，它可能会提供假阴性或假阳性结果，这对获取有关病毒传播的真实信息毫无帮助。

Especially in the case of something like the Hantavirus, where every person on that cruise ship can theoretically be directly tracked and contacted, it’s better to do that process the hard way. 特别是在像汉坦病毒这样的情况下，理论上游轮上的每一个人都可以被直接追踪和联系，因此采用“笨办法”来处理反而更好。

“During small but highly fatal outbreaks, more precision is required,” Gurley wrote. “在规模小但致死率高的疫情爆发期间，需要更高的精确度，”格利写道。