Some states weigh house arrest tech to track COVID-19

To keep COVID-19 patients home some U.S. states weight using house arrest tech. Yahoo Finance's Melody Hahm breaks down the details.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: We're also learning more about new technologies that municipalities may be using to keep coronavirus patients at home and from going out and infecting other people. Melody Hahm has been covering that for us. So Melody, we're talking about those ankle bracelets in some cases that the people who have gotten out of prison or who are under house arrest have to have to track them. I mean, this seems pretty extreme.

MELODY HAHM: Yeah, you could call it invasive, to say the least. And it would work in either two forms, either house arrest with that ankle bracelet as you mentioned or just a location tracking app, which, to be honest, we all have enabled on our phones anyway.

This is modeled after South Korea, Hong Kong, a lot of nations in Asia in particular that have mandated folks who are traveling from overseas to download an app, and for 14 days, they are being tracked. They're being monitored, and that's a contact tracing sort of way, where it's a passive approach, but at the same time, there is, of course, general buy-in from those nations, unlike, perhaps, a country like the United States.

Hawaii, in particular, is actually very serious about considering this use of GPS-enabled ankle bracelets or that tracking app. And they say that this falls in the realm of legality because of such a dire, unprecedented situation. Same thing with Louisville, Kentucky, where seven different folks who were caught violating the stay-at-home orders, they were actually told to be monitored via ankle bracelet.

So they're a case by case basis at this point. Colorado is another state that is seriously looking into this. As of now, it's very preliminary, very early stages. But as we anticipate, as people go back to work, as people try to figure out where people have been, whom they have gotten in contact with, this could be a decent solution.

ADAM SHAPIRO: But is 14 realistic? Because we all hear stories about people who had COVID-19 and a month later, still test positive.

MELODY HAHM: Exactly. This is not a panacea by any means, but if you do look at the trajectory of a country like Korea, it clearly is effective to a certain degree, right? And maybe it's psychological, too, knowing that you are being tracked, understanding that there is surveillance, for better or for worse, perhaps that does alter behavior in a way that people who act freely, knowing that there's no repercussions really, perhaps you don't see the downside there.

I can tell you for a fact, here in California, two people that I know who were driving on the highway over the last few weeks, they were actually pulled over, being asked by cops where they were going. One of them, interestingly enough, out of fear said, oh, I'm actually going to work. And the cop asked him, OK, do you need to be going to work right now? And he was given a slap on the wrist.

Interestingly enough, he was actually going to the grocery store, which was actually an essential business endeavor that he had to do. But at the same time, I think people are now caught off-guard, trying to understand when is an appropriate time to actually be leaving the house.

DAN HOWLEY: Melody, does this fly in the US, though? I mean, we can't even get people to wear masks without throwing up, you know, signs of don't tread on me, and this is an invasion of my rights. How do we get people to wear ankle bracelets, or even as in South Korea, the wrist bracelets?

MELODY HAHM: Exactly, Dan. And that's why I say it's so preliminary, and this is the earliest phases of ideation, right? This is sort of a moonshot idea for a country like the United States, just because, yeah, much of our country really is obsessed with personal liberties. And we do see these stay-at-home order anti-protests to a certain degree. So we anticipate that this cohort is very small, very niche for the time being.

But I also want to cite a new poll from NPR and Harvard that found that only nine states are actually meeting minimum requirements for testing at this point. So we clearly need to find a solution, and just kind of making testing kits more ubiquitous at this point is not going to really cure this situation for us.