Contact tracing has a time and place, and it's early in isolated outbreaks. The cat is out of the bag at this point and thinking we're going to contact trace our way to safety is a false promise. You'd have to be naive and short-sighted to accept their pinky-promise of privacy-first in this context.
If you assume the goal of contact tracing is to literally find every infection, yes, this isn't going to work. If you assume the point of this is to reduce R0, then this will work just fine at any stage of the pandemic.
There's obviously a question of what you should do when you find out you have been in contact, and that will differ depending on the stage. We probably want to be in a position where everyone who has come into contact with an infected person can get a test asap and if necessary then go into full isolation, not just going out less.
It's about maintaining an R0 < 1 after social distancing is relaxed. Without contact tracing we're destined for a cycling of lockdowns until we have a vaccine.
if you re not social distancing there s no way you can stop this virus with an app. it's a highly highly infectious airborne virus. you can ease the lockdown and keep distancing rules. not sure if the app will help in that case
> Contact tracing has a time and place, and it's early in isolated outbreaks. The cat is out of the bag at this point and thinking we're going to contact trace our way to safety is a false promise.
It’s quite obvious that more intrusive measures (lockdowns) are needed now, but what do you do once they’ve Had their effect? You can’t just abolish all measures, as you’d be back to square one. That’s where this comes in handy.
> You'd have to be naive and short-sighted to accept their pinky-promise of privacy-first in this context.
Or, more constructively, you could examine the spec and see whether it’s privacy preserving as promised, and ensure that the deployed software confirms to the spec. How about that?
> It’s quite obvious that more intrusive measures (lockdowns) are needed now...
Or less intrusive measures. We should shelter in place the vulnerable and let everyone else out like Sweden, and this will sort itself out amicably in a few weeks. Leaving the entire population with lasting immunity, preventing any chance of resurgence. [1]
> Leaving the entire population with lasting immunity
Based on what we know, I don't see how you could carve a large enough population group out where you have < 1/300 chance of death and < 1/50 chance of being hospitalized. Your timeline is realistically years to not overrun hospitals, if this is even an acceptable death rate [which it won't be in developed countries]
That's literally what both Iceland and South Korea rely on. Neither country has SIPs (Iceland even has primary schools open) and the peak is behind them.
(Iceland's outbreak is at about the same infection rate as the Bay Area if you estimate with hospitalizations/deaths. Daegu was significantly worse than the Bay Area per capita).
iceland launched the C19 app on april 1, 1 week after their epidemic had already peaked. I havent seen their install statistics , but i m not sure it s as effective as people here think it is
exactly. do we have data about whether contact tracing of this kind ever worked? S.Korea started testing+tracing somewhere midway in their epidemic, far earlier than where the epidemic is now in france, uk and USA. maybe other countries can benefit from this tracing, but it remains to be proved. In Singapore, which does well, apparently only 6% of ppl installed the contact tracing app. Israel seems to be using carrier data. People seem to be missing the forest in here
> Let’s start with China, where citizens in hundreds of cities have been required to download cellphone software that broadcasts their location to several authorities, including the local police. The app combines geotracking with other data, such as travel bookings, to designate citizens with color codes ranging from green (low risk) to red (high risk). High-risk individuals can be banned from apartment complexes, offices, and even grocery stores. Many human-rights advocates fear that what has been rolled out as a public-health app is moonlighting as a tool of government espionage and mass discrimination.
> Next, let’s look at South Korea, a democracy that has arguably been more successful than any other in containing the spread of the virus. The government uses several sources, such as cellphone-location data, CCTV, and credit-card records, to broadly monitor citizens’ activity. When somebody tests positive, local governments can send out an alert, a bit like a flood warning, that reportedly includes the individual’s last name, sex, age, district of residence, and credit-card history, with a minute-to-minute record of their comings and goings from various local businesses. “In some districts, public information includes which rooms of a building the person was in, when they visited a toilet, and whether or not they wore a mask,” Mark Zastrow, a reporter for Nature, wrote. “Even overnight stays at ‘love motels’ have been noted.”
if this rolled out, just the knowledge of its existence would probably put some fear in people to comply with whatever the government was asking people to do. it's a case being made for total surveillance.
