Creating a Contact Tracing Testbed with Neo4j and Faker

Over the past few weeks and months, I have been living through the Covid-19 pandemic like many others. It's not been easy - but at the same time I feel very fortunate to have been able to stay healthy, active, working, and connected. There's a lot of people out there that are a lot less fortunate, and my heart goes out to them.

On this blog, I have been writing about using graphs for Contact Tracing quite a bit. See 

• the original blogpost series over here,
• the demo movies that I made
• the Neo4j Browser guide that you can use

Fortunately, these articles were very well received by the community - we have had a ton of discussions with a variety of different individuals, companies and governments about how to use this technology to prevent that the next lockdown would again require immobilising so many healthy people. If the pandemic's second wave hits, we all want people at risk / sick people to be separated from the healthy population, and manage the spread of the disease in this way. But all of that requires contact tracing to be effective and operational - which is not a trivial thing to do.

This is why I have been looking at creating a very easy to use testbed for Contact Tracing in Neo4j. I wanted to make it super easy for people to create synthetic contact tracing datasets, and then work with them to gain experience - valuable experience for the "real deal" when we have to manage that. That's what this post is about.