The formats of epidemiological risk information disclosure and citizens’ voluntary self-reporting for close contact: report accuracy, time consumption, and privacy concerns

Timely contact tracing is important to prevent the occurrence and control the spread of an infectious disease. To complement the active case investigation and contact tracing, one often adopted practice is to publish lists of times and locations of risk and ask citizens to engage in self-reporting in case they find that they have visited the listed places in the corresponding time windows. This study tries to provide the first experimental study on how different formats to display the times and locations of risk affect the accuracy of self-reporting. Our task for the subjects is to read a list of times and locations of risk within a three-day window and compare the list with their own route of visits to decide whether to report being a close-contact or not. We construct the hypothetical lists and routes of visits of the subjects using published lists in the past, varying the length of the list, the routes of visits, and whether there is an overlap between the two for across tasks. The baseline treatment of display format is to sort places and times of risk by individuals with positive nucleic acid test. We compare subjects’ self-report accuracy with two alternative formats: sorting the information by locations, and by time, eliminating link between individuals and the places of risk. We hypothesize that the accuracy in the two alternative formats, in which information is organized in an easier way for search, is higher than the baseline treatment. We will also measure individuals’ privacy concerns regarding the list of risk information and expect the alternative formats to lead to lower concerns of privacy. Another dependent variable to consider is the time spent for the task.