Conclusion

In this paper, we discuss several blockchain- use cases for the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper focused on outbreak tracking to mitigate the spread of falsified or modified data. Our proposed blockchain-based solution promotes transparency, traceability and streamlines the communication between stakeholders in the network. Moreover, it ensures data immutability and security while simultaneously encourages the collection of data from trusted sources. Integrating blockchain technology in tracking solutions increases the reliability of trusted sources and allows the public and healthcare officials to make sound judgements based on the latest accurate web feeds available in the distributed ledgers.
We proposed solution uses Ethereum smart contracts and oracles as primary components. Our framework used smart contracts to execute functions without intermediaries while using oracles to feed the contract with real-time data as it acts as a gateway between the real world and blockchain network. The developed system would update the Dapps and dashboards with real-time statistics related to the number of confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries. The presented system architecture, sequence diagram and algorithms can be easily generalized for tracking various other infectious diseases. Our solution addresses the problems faced in the current pandemic crisis such as miscommunication, data manipulation and single point of failure. Furthermore, it mitigates malicious activities due to its inherent cryptography security features. The smart contract code is made publicly available in GitHub. The functions developed were tested in the Remix environment to demonstrate the validity and operational aspects of the smart contract as detailed in the algorithms.
We present a detailed cost analysis to compute the transaction costs incurred when interacting with the smart contract. The results indicate that a minimal cost of less than 1 USD is incurred when executing transactions while the cost of deploying the contract was less than 4 USD. This demonstrates that the proposed solution is feasible and cost-effective for all stakeholders. In addition, we present security analysis pertaining to integrity, accountability, authorization, non-repudiation and resilient to common forms of cyber-attacks including DDoS attacks. For future work, we aim to expand the smart contract functionalities and develop Dapps to enable participants to interact with Ethereum smart contracts seamlessly.