Covid: How to Manage Going Forward?

I would like to see us

• develop a test which is easy to self administer.
• package this test in a kit which includes an electronic component that evaluates the test result and cryptographically generates a key whose value encapsulates the result, the time, and the person's unique ID.
• support incorporating this result into a location aware phone app, which shares the information with a public database.
• present this test status to the network so that other people in the vicinity can see it.

In this way each person has a silent but visible state: infected, not infected, and immune. So there is no document check, but if an infected -- or untested -- person steps onto a subway car, everyone in the car would be alerted through their phones that they are in proximity to this infection threat.

If it is determined that it is possible for a person to be infected but not initially have a positive test result, then this app could automate contact tracing by keeping a rolling buffer of recent locations. Server-side code would trace backwards to the most recent clean test result to see who has been physically close to the infected person during the intervening window of time. People at risk would be given a new state: quarantined. The quarantine could be brief depending on the sensitivity of the test to those early-stage infections.

Anyone not participating in this scheme would be obligated to maintain social distancing and wear an N-95 mask when indoors. (Obviously this is a policy for the future when the N-95 shortage has been resolved.) Obviously people in this category would not be allowed to participate in group events.

Ideally this would not be a permanent scheme, but just a measure taken until covid is definitively eliminated.