  Manual contact tracing is a top-down solution that starts with contact
tracers at the public health level, who identify the contacts of infected
individuals, interview them to get additional context about the exposure, and
also monitor their symptoms and support them until the incubation period is
passed. On the other hand, digital contact tracing is a bottom-up solution that
starts with citizens who on obtaining a notification about possible exposure to
an infected individual may choose to ignore the notification, get tested to
determine if they were actually exposed or self-isolate and monitor their
symptoms over the next two weeks. Most experts recommend a combination of
manual contact tracing and digital contact advice but they are not based on a
scientific basis. For example, a possible hybrid solution could involve a
smartphone based alert that requests the possible contact of an infected
individual to call the Public Health (PH) number for next steps, or in some
cases, suggest ways to self-assess in order to reduce the burden on PH so only
most critical cases require a phone conversation. In this paper, we aim to
compare the manual and digital approaches to contact tracing and provide
suggestions for potential hybrid solutions.
