Yahoo Finance Jeremy Hunt says Covid cases in self isolation should be tracked by GPS
GPS tracking of people in quarantine should be considered by the Government to improve compliance, says Jeremy Hunt.
The former Health Secretary said Britain should “if necessary” follow the example of Taiwan and Poland where people have to take selfies of themselves and their location and provide GPS data to show they are quarantining where they said they would be.
It is understood to be one of the options for further measures being discussed by ministers at the Cabinet coronavirus operations committee on Tuesday as a potential supplement or alternative to quarantine hotels.
Mr Hunt said a key part of the Government’s strategy should be improving compliance by those who were infectious given as Cabinet Office surveys suggested three quarters of people with symptoms did not fully self-isolate and 15 per cent even went to work.
“Closing borders and quarantine hotels is a sensible step,” he tweeted. “But we won’t address [the] heart of the problem unless we deal with domestic transmission. We need to raise compliance with isolation to 95%+ rates achieved in Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.”
Mr Hunt said the Government could mandate tracking based on geolocation data already provided by users to tech platforms like Google and Facebook for free.
He also suggested guaranteeing to “backfill” people’s loss of wages from self-isolating as “loss of earnings seems to be the biggest cause of non-compliance and the overall cost is much cheaper than another lockdown.”
