As things stand, the nearest bridge between conditions today and a return to normalcy is contact tracing. With no cure, vaccine or sure path to acquiring natural immunity five months after the first confirmed cases were diagnosed last December in China, the path ahead remains treacherous. The World Health Organisation suggested this week that it would be foolhardy to predict the end of the pandemic and there is little choice but to live with Covid-19, much as mankind lives with HIV, another coronavirus. Having killed more than 300,000 people after infecting over 4.5 million, the new virus continues its deadly march. But with growing evidence that infection curves are flattening, nations are cautiously emerging from lockdowns, relaxing measures and taking modest steps to resume some semblance of normal life.

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New Zealand and Australia, protected by their geographical isolation and stringent lockdowns, are opening up public spaces to allow limited social interactions. China and South Korea, both of whom had success with different but effective containment methods, have had some reverses this week as new clusters of infections were discovered. Likewise, Germany, which began relaxing restrictions late last month, saw the reproduction rate of infections rise, signalling a faster doubling in cases. Chancellor Angela Merkel was forced to assume a higher risk in letting shopping, education, sport and other activities resume.

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This is the tightrope between protecting lives and livelihoods that governments will have to continue to walk for the rest of this year until safe vaccines are found and supplied in adequate quantities for universal immunisation. In the meantime, the ability to treat Covid-19 is improving, with a handful of drugs showing promise. For now, however, testing and isolating patients and identifying their contacts to ensure they do not interact with others is critical to protecting communities. This tested method has shown effectiveness in breaking chains of infection.

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The innovation in our times is that with smartphones, geolocation and Bluetooth, this can be done far more quickly, cheaply and accurately with a variety of contact tracing techniques. These are far from flawless, of course. The ability of technology to detect contact points is not fail-proof enough for health authorities to rely on it completely. Users also worry about the loss of anonymity and dislike giving out personal information that can potentially be misused or can expose them to stigma. Such privacy concerns have prompted the United States to begin recruiting an army of contact tracers instead. Singapore’s TraceTogether app has only 1.4 million users, whereas around four times that number is needed for contact tracing to be effective. Each nation has the task of assuaging concerns. But the primary objective cannot but be to save lives and livelihoods.