NZ is also postponing app tracing as our cases hit zero, and our PM recommends old school ppl power. (200 tracers on standby with more being trained just in case)
NZ and Iceland may be unique, but I am extremely skeptical about tracking apps being useful at all elsewhere, in comparison to large teams of trained contact tracers.
I'm skeptical of the idea with regard to civil liberties, but I don't see why one would doubt it's efficacy. It's a tool to make the contract tracers more productive, and I expect it will be fit for purpose.
The biggest problem with contact tracing apps is that contact tracing in general is not very effective when the case rate is high. Its ideal use is to deal with the first case arriving in an isolated area. The sixth wave in the heart of NYC, not so useful.
This means that the scalability advantages of tech don't synergize well with the uses of contact tracing. If you don't have very many cases to worry about, a dedicated team of humans will do just as well. And not have nearly the same long-term privacy issues.
That seems unlikely to me given that no jurisdiction has unlimited resources, not everything is captured on camera, patient's memories aren't perfect, and there may be incentives to lie or otherwise under-report certain contacts when things aren't completely anonymous. (For example, in many countries patients are likely to avoid revealing contact with a drug dealer.)
In comparison, DP-3T (and also the joint Apple-Google framework based on an earlier revision of it) will capture any significant contact provided that both parties are carrying appropriate devices. It also maintains anonymity, so it removes nearly all incentives to mis- or under- report. It's not a replacement for teams of people, but it should provide significant improvements in areas where the majority of people are carrying such devices.
> And not have nearly the same long-term privacy issues.
Neither DP-3T, the Apple-Google framework, or the TCN protocol have any significant privacy implications (beyond whatever is already associated with carrying the physical device doing the tracing, and to the best of my knowledge of course).
Right but the hard part isn’t making the app anonymous it’s getting people to carry it. Which is significantly harder when no one cares. Iceland has less than 40% uptake in a reasonably educated population that is taking the pandemic seriously. Extrapolate from there and things don’t look great.
The post I responded to specifically objected to efficacy as well as privacy concerns so I limited my response to those points.
As to Iceland's 40% uptake, their app isn't anonymous - in the event you test positive you share your full location data with the people doing the contact tracing. It's also not built into the operating system so there's more friction for user uptake.
To be clear, I'm not saying contact tracing is useless. I'm saying its effectiveness scales inversely with the case rate.
At very low case rates, the overhead and required adoption rates for an app-based tracing system are major disadvantages against human contact tracers. As case rates go up, that overhead starts to pay off and apps make sense. But as case rates continue to go up further, you get less and less information from contact tracing. At some point, when case rates are high enough, it basically becomes a single bit of information: did you go out? Yes? Then you were probably exposed. At that point, the app isn't adding much value!
I believe that in many places around the world dealing with COVID-19, we are closer to the latter scenario than a lot of people think. No, we're not literally in the scenario above (it was an exemplar), but the general point that case rates may be too high for contact tracing to "save us" is still worth making.
Contact tracing doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be enough to kick the replication factor down from >1 to <1. I would be surprised if the factors you mention would reduce the effectiveness of contact tracing by more than, say, 5%.
Iceland has also has a large team of contact tracers. Which
has been pretty key along with our large scale testing of the population. The fact we’re still below 40% is a good indicator that this idea is pretty bad.
One thing the app might be used for is to allow visitors in without quarantine. Prove you have tested negative recently and use the app so if you do get sick we at least have a vague idea of where you were.
The logs that businesses are keeping in NZ are quite funny. The whole ‘write something on this bit of paper’ process is basically opt in as far as I can tell.
Every place I've been has a pen and paper and hand sanitiser next to it so you can sanitise before/after.
If the place you went to doesn't have the sanitiser part then they're probably breaching their public health obligations. You can ask them to put out sanitiser or report a breach.
As an aside, I'm impressed in NZ that there's a central place to report issues but then issues are dispatched to the right agency to follow up. That makes it super easy to report issues.
I just went to the shopping mall near me for the first time since it opened. I notice it was essentially random as to which stores required you to 'sign in' and how they did it. Some had nothing at all.
