Like many others, I've alternated between a mild obsession with learning everything about COVID-19 and never wanting to hear about it again. I recently watched the governor of Massachusetts on CBS News' Face the Nation. He spoke of Partners in Health's use of contact tracing in Ebola- and Zika-stricken countries, and then said something that struck me: "It's not theoretical. They've done it before. They know how to do it." His message was: It works.
I began reading about how contact tracing worked for outbreaks like Ebola and researched what other countries are doing. In Israel, the Ministry of Health has released an app that uses cellular GPS data to provide alerts when people nearby are documented carriers of COVID-19. In the private sector, Google and Apple developed a contact-tracing app for the billions of people worldwide who use iOS and Android.
The World Health Organization (WHO) describes a three-step process for contact tracing: Contact ID, then Listing (investigating who individuals with confirmed cases had contact with), and finally, Follow-up. It hit me that this is eerily similar to what I have spent my career as an intel analyst doing.
IdentificationThreat intelligence analysts use any number of tools for threat identification, plus additional tools to store these indicators. Traditionally, analysts use their own spreadsheets and Word documents as living workspaces or scratch pads to begin investigations. As they collaborate with others inside the organization, there is an enormous amount of cutting and pasting information from ..
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