ArticleNature communications2023
Individual level analysis of digital proximity tracing for COVID-19 in Belgium highlights major bottlenecks.
Article in Nature communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Impact of Digital Contact Tracing and Other Nonpharmaceutical Interventions on Pandemic Control: Microlevel, Behavior-Driven Agent-Based Model Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Belgium's SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing effectively curbed transmission, yet challenges persist in terms of delays, scalability and population adherence.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Contact tracing strategies for infectious diseases: A systematic literature review.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Estimating the contribution of setting-specific contacts to SARS-CoV-2 transmission using digital contact tracing data.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Individual level analysis of digital proximity tracing for COVID-19 in Belgium highlights major bottlenecks.Nature communications · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To complement labour-intensive conventional contact tracing, digital proximity tracing was implemented widely during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the privacy-centred design of the dominant Google-Apple exposure notification framework has hindered assessment of its effectiveness. Between October 2021 and January 2022, we systematically collected app use and notification receipt data within a test and trace programme targeting around 50,000 university students in Leuven, Belgium. Due to low success rates in each studied step of the digital notification cascade, only 4.3% of exposed contacts (CI: 2.8-6.1%) received such notifications, resulting in 10 times more cases detected through conventional contact tracing. Moreover, the infection risk of digitally traced contacts (5.0%; CI: 3.0-7.7%) was lower than that of conventionally traced non-app users (9.8%; CI: 8.8-10.7%; p = 0.002). Contrary to common perception as near instantaneous, there was a 1.2-day delay (CI: 0.6-2.2) between case PCR result and digital contact notification. These results highlight major limitations of a digital proximity tracing system based on the dominant framework.
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Registered trials
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