CovTracer-EN: The Journey of Covid-19 Digital Contact Tracing in Cyprus

Contact Tracing (CT) is an effective mitigation measure against the Covid-19 pandemic that is typically performed manually. Its technological counterpart, i.e., Digital Contact Tracing (DCT), has emerged as potential, yet controversial due to privacy concerns, complementary tool to identify exposed individuals automatically. Among DCT solutions, privacy-preserving DCT mobile apps that rely on a Bluetooth-based protocol recently developed jointly by Google and Apple are becoming increasingly popular and have already been deployed in 67 territories around the world. Recent studies indicate that such apps are promising in controlling the spread of infections, yet their adoption is still low. This work presents CovTracer-EN, the national privacy-preserving DCT app in Cyprus that triggers Exposure Notifications (EN) to users that had contact with another infected user who shared this information anonymously with his/her consent. Performance evaluation results and lessons learned aim to offer useful insights and practical guidelines to public health authorities that consider deploying DCT apps for reducing the impact of Covid-19 and future pandemics.