The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus has causedwidespread panic and global initiatives are geared towards treatmentand limiting its spread. With technological advancements,several mechanisms and mobile applications have been developedthat attempt to trace the physical contact made by a personwith someone who has been tested COVID-19 positive. Whiledesigning these apps, user’s privacy has been an afterthoughtand has resulted in mass violations of privacy of the public andthe patients. A total of 32 countries have designed apps andrely on them as a strategy to flatten the pandemic curve. Alongwith lack of privacy, these methodologies are centralized, wherethey are fully controlled by the government and the healthcareproviders. Owing to these and many other concerns, peopleare hesitant in the adoption of these technologies. This paperpresents a detailed analysis of user tracking apps belongingto 32 countries, thus demonstrating that they collect personaldata and are a gross violation of user privacy. This paperpresents a novel architecture for the efficient, effective andprivacy-preserving contact tracing of COVID-19 patients usingblockchain. The proposed architecture preserves the privacy ofindividuals and their contact history by encrypting all the dataspecific to an individual using a privacy-preserving Homomorphicencryption scheme and storing it on a permissioned blockchainnetwork. The contacts made with a COVID-19 positive patientare identified by performing search queries directly over theHomomorphic encrypted data stored in the blocks. Therefore,only those contacts that are suspected to be COVID-19 positivemay be decrypted by the healthcare professional or governmentfor further contact tracing/ diagnosis and COVID-19 testing;thereby leading to enhanced privacy. KCI Citation Count: 1