Like previous similar outbreaks such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), manual contact tracing and follow-up control measures such as quarantine and isolation were crucially important and successful during these outbreaks. Other strategies including mass testing and manual contact tracing (using humans or health professionals to collect data) have been deployed to contain the disease and to help ease lockdown restrictions.

In response to the rapidly growing number of cases and the danger of overburdening health systems, many countries have resulted in lockdowns to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. In the fall of 2020, new mutations and variants of this disease detected in the U.K and South Africa, B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 respectively, have since emerged and are circulating globally. The novel COVID-19 disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has rapidly spread with increased fatalities across the world leading to a worldwide pandemic. Other challenges identified and discussed include ethical issues, security vulnerabilities, user behaviour and participation, and technical constraints. We explore and discuss from the selected literature, the key challenges and issues that influence unwillingness to use these contact tracing apps in neo-liberal societies which include the plausibility of abuse of user privacy rights and lack of trust in the government and public health authorities by their citizens.

Further inputs were also taken from preprints, published government and technical reports. The searches were conducted between January 1, 2020, through 31st January 2021. The searches were run against the title, keywords, or abstract, depending on the search platforms. The systematic literature review was conducted by searching databases of Google Scholar, Web of Science, PubMed, IEEE Xplore Digital Library, PsycInfo and ScienceDirect using the search terms (“ Contact Tracing” OR “ Contact Tracing apps”) AND (“ COVID-19” OR “ Coronavirus”) to identify relevant literature.

Address map for spore app