From Foreign Waters

Contact tracing is a technique to find out how many people have come in contact with an infected person and then figuring out the entire web of people those individuals interacted with. The tracing is done through smartphone's Bluetooth signals, which would identify with whom all the owner of the device recently met, level of proximity and duration of the meeting, if it was long enough to catch a contagion. As the tracing goes on, a warning message is sent to all those who came in contact with the infected person, along with a local health authority. The technique would help prevent the outbreak of the deadly diseases like COVID-19. Since the spread of the highly contagious coronavirus, many tech companies have been working on building various applications to conduct a similar tracking, but their major limitation came in terms of scale, features, software or region. On Friday, Technology giants Apply and Google announced their joint project to develop a contact tracing ap...

The pandemic outbreak of coronavirus has changed the course of life and made face-masks, deserted roads, temperature checks-points, police check-posts, house quarantine, work from home, and virtual meetings our new normal. While coughing and sneezing has become a taboo, social distancing has become a global cure against this contagion. Today, with failing health systems, crippling economies, blocked supplies and dying populations, the world needs to stand together more than ever. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 crisis is bringing out the worst of human element - whether its banning export of essential commodities at national level, or non-sharing of resources at state level or stockpiling greedily at an individual level.   Like most of the nations across world, India is also under complete lockdown and in such circumstances falling sick even with an influenza can be a very daunting experience. A few weeks ago due to a sinus attack I was feeling sick and went to the nearest chemi...