> NHS Covid-19's users have long been able to scan a QR code when entering a shop, restaurant or other venue to log within the app the fact that they had visited.
Is there still evidence for this type of contact tracing? Was it ever even shown to work or reduce infection?
It seems now we should just be focusing on vaccinating everyone. Everything else is just noise at this point or political virtue signaling.
Yes - it has played a major role in Australia’s elimination strategy - the key difference has been the Australian government fines individuals (starts at $1600 spot fine) and businesses (up to $100k per non-compliant location) heavily for non-compliance - which hasn’t happened in any other country that I’m aware of...
No, the key difference is that in Australia you would have 2 infected individuals and then you trace their whereabouts and involve the media, whereas in the UK there’s tens of thousands of infected individuals at any given time, most of which are undetected.
Incorrect - we have had outbreaks with 1000s of people infected - but as the post above you correctly mentioned - when that happened, we did an incredibly strict lock down.
For example, for ~3 months we had:
- 1 person could go grocery shopping once per day for 1 hour
- you could only go outside for a maximum of 1 hour per day for excervise only
- every single organisation (other than critical care locations) had their physical locations shut down
- everyone was mandated to wear masks outside of their residence
And a bunch more...
We had ~5 community cases identified in Brisbane recently and the entire city went into an instant hard lockdown for 3 days whilst contact tracers worked out the scale of the issue.
It has nothing to do with how many cases we have, but everything to do with how harshly and rapidly we prevent community interaction.
Contact tracing was and is a major part of the response in Canada. We have similar fines and penalties. Quarantine Act emergency measures are in effect. Thousands have been fined. A handful of wilful breakers of ordered quarantine have been criminally charged.
The drastic difference in outcome so far compared to Australia boils down to just a few differences, as far as I can tell:
* we never truly closed the border. We should probably have tried harder, but it is impossible to strictly do so with the USA, at least. The majority of cases in last March and April were from American visitors, and locals who had travelled there. Those seeds of outbreak seem to still be the main strain circulating now.
* our lockdowns were not quite as strict, or strictly enforced, and were more haphazard for when they were applied and when they were loosened
* testing was not deployed as rapidly or widely
* contact tracing becomes less and less feasible with the more cases there are, and past a tipping point it becomes hopeless to expect it will actually contain it (though they certainly still try)
Never mind the usefulness of contact tracing. The issue here is that Google and Apple clearly said "Thou shalt not create logs of user locations". NHS (i.e. government) first said "OK", but then tried to sneak in user location logging as part of an update.
To which Google and Apple said "hard NO".
Which is the correct response to privacy-violating function creep.
I think there's a big difference between some tech company secretly logging user locations for their nefarious, privacy-violating money-making ends, and a national health system working to allow life to return to normal for millions of it's citizens whist trying to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths in the midst of a worldwide pandemic.
I think Apple/Google should put a little bit more effort into this -- this sort of tech is going to be essential in getting countries re-opened safely, especially with questions around the efficacy of vaccines with some of these new COVID variants.
Anyone who's worried about the privacy can simply choose not to scan the QR codes (or not enable the feature / install the app).
Is that actually a valid alternative for people who are worried about privacy? I thought that the centralized tracking was mandatory for pubs, shops, and other venues.
The first iteration of the NHS app included a central location history repository. (That version failed for reasons unrelated to this, though.)
Apple and Google then proved that effective contact tracing was possible without building a centralized location repository and offered a toolkit based on that approach. The next iteration - ground-up rewrite, really - of the NHS app then used that toolkit, and functioned just fine.
Data minimisation / parsimony of collection is one of the principles enshrined in UK data protection law. It's common sense, too. One cannot leak or misuse data one doesn't collect. Since the NHS app worked just fine without uploading location history to a central repository, it follows that the reason for wanting to do this anyway was unrelated to the app's ostensible purpose.
Plenty of venues and shops make it a condition of entry now to scan their QR code into the NHS app. Not scanning the code, or not having the app installed means no entry to shops and (takeaway) restaurants. The thing is becoming compulsory by the back door. A choice not to install or use it no longer exists. This is worrying in its own right, but it is also a very good reason to insist that its data collection and use are limited to what is strictly necessary for the app to function.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 22.1 ms ] threadIs there still evidence for this type of contact tracing? Was it ever even shown to work or reduce infection?
It seems now we should just be focusing on vaccinating everyone. Everything else is just noise at this point or political virtue signaling.
For example, for ~3 months we had:
- 1 person could go grocery shopping once per day for 1 hour
- you could only go outside for a maximum of 1 hour per day for excervise only
- every single organisation (other than critical care locations) had their physical locations shut down
- everyone was mandated to wear masks outside of their residence
And a bunch more...
We had ~5 community cases identified in Brisbane recently and the entire city went into an instant hard lockdown for 3 days whilst contact tracers worked out the scale of the issue.
It has nothing to do with how many cases we have, but everything to do with how harshly and rapidly we prevent community interaction.
The drastic difference in outcome so far compared to Australia boils down to just a few differences, as far as I can tell:
* we never truly closed the border. We should probably have tried harder, but it is impossible to strictly do so with the USA, at least. The majority of cases in last March and April were from American visitors, and locals who had travelled there. Those seeds of outbreak seem to still be the main strain circulating now.
* our lockdowns were not quite as strict, or strictly enforced, and were more haphazard for when they were applied and when they were loosened
* testing was not deployed as rapidly or widely
* contact tracing becomes less and less feasible with the more cases there are, and past a tipping point it becomes hopeless to expect it will actually contain it (though they certainly still try)
"Australia has done better than other countries" is correlation. Is it causation?
I'm not sure what you mean by "this type". What you've quoted is how contact tracing works. It does work, see for example https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03518-4
On a lighter note here is two rats arguing about wheather they should get the convid nonvax jib jab http://picc.io/p/tq2sFHU.png
To which Google and Apple said "hard NO".
Which is the correct response to privacy-violating function creep.
I think Apple/Google should put a little bit more effort into this -- this sort of tech is going to be essential in getting countries re-opened safely, especially with questions around the efficacy of vaccines with some of these new COVID variants.
Anyone who's worried about the privacy can simply choose not to scan the QR codes (or not enable the feature / install the app).
Apple and Google then proved that effective contact tracing was possible without building a centralized location repository and offered a toolkit based on that approach. The next iteration - ground-up rewrite, really - of the NHS app then used that toolkit, and functioned just fine.
Data minimisation / parsimony of collection is one of the principles enshrined in UK data protection law. It's common sense, too. One cannot leak or misuse data one doesn't collect. Since the NHS app worked just fine without uploading location history to a central repository, it follows that the reason for wanting to do this anyway was unrelated to the app's ostensible purpose.
Plenty of venues and shops make it a condition of entry now to scan their QR code into the NHS app. Not scanning the code, or not having the app installed means no entry to shops and (takeaway) restaurants. The thing is becoming compulsory by the back door. A choice not to install or use it no longer exists. This is worrying in its own right, but it is also a very good reason to insist that its data collection and use are limited to what is strictly necessary for the app to function.