ORANGE COUNTY, CA / ACCESSWIRE / May 1, 2020 / From WWW.CONTAKT.WORLD Buzzfeed writers Caroline Haskins, Stephanie M. Lee, Megha Rajagopalan, and Pranav Dixit delivered a comprehensive piece this week on our need for an "army of contact tracers."
In response to the unprecedented global pandemic of COVID-19 declared by the WHO on March 11th, a patent-pending1 system was filed with the United States Patent & Trademark Office ("USPTO") on March 31, 2020. To contain the pandemic, the system will meet the inescapable need for efficient, ethical contact tracing and health surveillance on a local and global scale. After maintaining a low profile, CONTAKT (www.CONTAKT.world) is now taking pilot requests from enterprise (500+ employees), local jurisdictions, academic institutions, state governments, and territories throughout the world.
The company will select its initial pilot participant(s) on or before May 25, 2020. All other requests will be offered V1.0 deployment as quickly as possible. Determined to deploy its solutions regardless of financial capacity - CONTAKT encourages developing nations or under-funded jurisdictions to apply.
CONTAKT's platform approach is tailored to the needs of local epidemiologists, agencies, and contact tracers - without compromising civil liberties of individuals. Due to its inherent privacy features and use of blockchain for contact tracing and health surveillance (patent-pending1) - CONTAKT offers deployment to large or small populations via "background" mobile applications, or through anonymized "opt-in" consumer apps. Most importantly, no corporation (not even CONTAKT) has access to personal information of its system users. In CONTAKT -- a user's encrypted personal information is strictly used for local contact tracing and health surveillance and cannot be used by conflicting interests (as it is not accessible). CONTAKT is committed to using formal guidance from the global health community on how to further insulate personal information from improper use.
CONTAKT's mission is to ethically and sustainably provide the world's population and global health experts with the backbone for health surveillance and contact tracing - unencumbered by conflicting interests related to the use of personal information. CONTAKT endorses a public debate among thought leaders to address the risks and rewards of global health surveillance, and to dInevelop a standard by which any tracing applications must adhere.
Understanding this is a lofty ambition, CONTAKT has formally and informally aligned with experts in global health, epidemiology, marginalized populations/nations to understand the implications of government or corporate access to personal information. While other applications have avoided privacy implications by removing geolocation data or storing data "on-device" - these strategies are extremely limited in their relevance to localized epidemiology.
On Memorial Day, Monday, May 25th, 2020, honoring those we have lost - CONTAKT will host an invitation-only global web-cast on its goals, solutions, partners, pilot participants, governance structure, and team. The company will also discuss its objective of achieving B-Corporation® status, the steps it is taking toward transparency and ethics, and how it will ensure its corporate charter and governance always considers public health with profit. A B-Corporation® (and CONTAKT, which is adopting its standards prior to certification) is legally required to consider the impact of its decisions on workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment. For CONTAKT founders, it is important that the company never place profit over humanity.
CONTAKT is designed from the ground up to directly empower local tracers with its scale, automations, and user-centered tools. At the same time, by providing anonymized data to regional, national, and international partners, CONTAKT will be an essential part of containing COVID-19 and preventing its resurgence, thereby helping us all get back to work. According to this study in Science3 - researchers have estimated that 60% of a population must adopt a contact-tracing app for it to be impactful. Some nations have set a target of 40% adoption. CONTAKT provides multiple paths to achieve statistically relevant penetration and testing integration and works on more devices (including those that don't have Bluetooth® turned on), making widespread adoption not only possible, but realistic.
"We are truly humbled by the reception CONTAKT has received in only one month and look forward to sharing more with stakeholders in the coming days and weeks," said Justin Beck, CEO of CONTAKT.
Stakeholders are encouraged to sign-up for updates by visiting WWW.CONTAKT.WORLD and stay tuned for new social media accounts.
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1 USPTO #63/100,755 filing date March 31, 2020 with international priority date of April 15, 2020 - all rights reserved.
2 A recent study in South Korea cited by Johns Hopkins University in a powerful audio discussed how local tracers go about their efforts on a day-to-day basis. Out of 30 cases in the study, tracers identified 2,000 contacts through "manual" questioning and telephone follow-ups. CONTAKT's patent-pending1 system provides local tracers and agencies with individual or mass SMS, robo-calling, syndromic surveillance, and automation (all in real-time) for contact tracing. Local tracers or agencies using the system can prioritize their efforts according to actual spread risk, informed by data gathered nearly instantaneously at a large-scale. CONTAKT's pilot and V1.0 deployment can be customized catered to nations, cities, counties, states, provinces, schools, enterprises, and academic institutions.
3 Quantifying SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests epidemic control with digital contact tracing
BY LUCA FERRETTI, CHRIS WYMANT, MICHELLE KENDALL, LELE ZHAO, ANEL NURTAY, LUCIE ABELER-DÖRNER, MICHAEL PARKER, DAVID BONSALL, CHRISTOPHE FRASER
PUBLISHED ONLINE31 MAR 2020
DOI: 10.1126/science.abb6936
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SOURCE: CONTAKT LLC