Understanding Backtracking in Exposure Alerts
Introduction
Many sexually transmitted diseases, such as HIV and herpes, will not show up on standard tests for many months. This means a recent test can yield a negative result, indicating the patient does not carry the disease, even if they are in the incubation period. A person can then unknowingly transmit diseases to new partners, believing they have had a clear test result for 6 months or more.
What is Backtracing?
Backtracing follows all your matches and their previous matches through the entire exposure chain to alert you if any person tests positive for any disease. Backtracing will then monitor the exposure chain to further alert you if the chain is broken by a person who tests negative after the incubation period has passed.
Why Backtracing is so important?
This monitoring is an extremely powerful tool to stop the spread of disease, especially for individuals with more than one partner per year, who cannot reliably test for new diseases within the incubation periods of 6-12 months.