South Moravia was chosen as a region that will test the project called smart quarantine. An isolation of COVID-19 patients and the search for other potentially infected people will be based on data obtained from patients’ mobile phones and credit card payments. With that information, it will be possible to reconstruct patients’ movement in last five days and identify other possible infected people. The whole project is still based on patients’ permission to use the personal data and the acquired information will be available only for experts compiling the map of infection. The data will also remain in the system for six hours maximum and then deleted. The whole project is built on Keboola which is a cloud data management system used by banks, large companies, and now Ministry of Health.
The purpose of smart quarantine is described by one of Keboola founders, Petr Šimeček: “The point is to keep in quarantine only those people who should be in it – and not keeping 10 million people at home. We want to help the state to make smart quarantine. To do this, it takes an extremely detailed work of hundreds of people who trace the movement of all the infected and find out whom they met, where they were and what they did.”
People who got in contact with COVID-19 confirmed patient will be ordered to stay in a short-term quarantine, which is explained by the chief of Central Crisis Staff Roman Prymula: “Those people will be marked as, so called, yellow persons and will be visited by sampling team in a few hours.”
The time limit for the sample taking is three days maximum. The sampling teams are assembled by the military and will perform the task for all the people who cannot report for the sample taking on their own and otherwise would have to use the public transportation. Therefore, those people who have a car can report for sample taking by themselves and do not have to wait for the sampling team.
In case of a positive result, the infected person is marked as red person and has to remain in a standard quarantine and treated, if need to be. In case of a negative result, the person is marked as green person and may return home without any restrictions.
If the project of smart quarantine proves to be effective, it may replace the restrictions on the national level, which negatively affect everyday life and economy. The introduction of smart quarantine in the whole Czech Republic is expected after Easter and it would be much desired at the state of emergency is already supposed to be prolonged.