Israel tries to curb COVID-19 spread by cellphone surveillance

The Israeli Security Agency (ISA) has been using cellphone location data to track people who were possibly exposed to the novel coronavirus.

Asher Shalmon, head of the international relations department in the Israeli Ministry of Health, said in an interview with Xinhua that the ministry is sending alerts to relevant people.

"We are sending alerts to people who were, for a substantial amount of time, in close proximity to confirmed coronavirus carriers. We ask them to self-quarantine," Shalmon said.

"It is too early to say how effective it is", Shalmon added.

As of Friday, Israel reported a total of 705 COVID-19 patients.

The Israeli strategy of fighting COVID-19 is to find and check people that were around confirmed cases instead of doing broad tests to the population.

"We would still at this point concentrate on testing suspicious cases, putting a relevant population into self-quarantine, and generally putting the whole population in kind of social distancing," stressed Shalmon.

On Wednesday evening, the Health Ministry stated that text messages were sent to about 400 people who were identified as being in close contact with COVID-19 patients.

The messages specified the dates when the receivers were in contact with the coronavirus patient and requested an immediate self-quarantine for a certain period of time.

Also, the message receivers were asked to call the national emergency service if they showed any symptoms like fever or cough.

On March 24, the Supreme Court of Israel will decide if ISA could continue to conduct cellphone surveillance, due to the petition of organizations over the concern of people's privacy and the legality of the measure.

It is the first time that ISA used its cutting-edge technology to surveil innocent Israeli citizens on a large scale as its traditional purpose of this technology is to prevent terrorism.

The Ministry of Health stressed that this tactic could better monitor the outbreak of COVID-19 and hence might avoid a total curfew on the Israeli public.