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In mid-March, Dr. Jim Bristow’s wife came down with gastrointestinal issues. Then, she couldn’t stop coughing. Her symptoms pointed to coronavirus, but she couldn’t get tested — in part because of the nationwide test shortage, but also because the pair lived in Vashon, an idyllic town on an island in Washington State’s Puget Sound with scant medical resources. When Dr. Anthony S. Fauci of President Trump’s coronavirus task force said that the United States was failing with regards to testing, Dr. Bristow, said that it “really struck me.” Dr. Bristow felt inspired to collaborate with other members in the Vashon community to develop a model to test, trace and isolate — in essence, a coronavirus response plan that they call the Rural Test & Trace Toolkit. (Yan, 5/16)

A half-dozen states have announced they’re building their own apps to pinpoint the spread of coronavirus so they won’t have to rely on similar efforts from distrusted big tech firms. So far, it’s not going well. North Dakota is getting spotty data from cell phone towers after relying on an app originally designed to connect its state university football fans on road trips to away games. Utah delayed the rollout of a GPS tracking function after technical difficulties. Other states, like Georgia, are promoting tools that rely on people to self-report new Covid-19 infections, potentially creating gaps in the effort to track the spread of the virus. (Ollstein and Ravindranath, 5/17)

All Maddie Bender knew when she called the New Haven, Conn., family was that a child had tested positive for Covid-19. Anyone who lived with the child was at risk of catching the new virus, and Bender needed to find out if they had symptoms, if new cases were taking root. What she learned was that public health work during a pandemic is four parts shoe leather and intuition, one part empathy. (Sataline, 5/18)

The continent that helped lead a backlash against Silicon Valley’s appetite for personal data is increasingly aligning itself with technology built by Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to blaze a path out of the coronavirus pandemic. Countries across Europe, like others in the developed world, are building their own smartphone apps to help conduct contact tracing. The aim of the apps is to help public-health officials identify and test everyone who has spent time near an infected person, to better understand and contain the virus. (Schechner and Strasburg, 5/17)

UnitedHealth Group and Microsoft partnered to launch a tool that allows employers to screen workers for COVID-19 symptoms.The smartphone app, called ProtectWell, asks users a series of questions to screen for symptoms or exposure to the coronavirus. Employers can then direct employees who may have been infected to get tested; results will be reported directly to the employer, the companies said Friday. (Livingston, 5/15)