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Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

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Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#331

Post by arcticbull »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #322
arcticbull wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not actually true. The seasonal flu affects 45,000,000 americans every year, and in part because it (a) mutates and (b) there's a huge number of strains, and different ones are dominant in different years. The flu shot is not particularly effective for those reasons (19-60% depending on the year). COVID however, does not mutate, or has not yet. This means herd immunity is on the table, and so is a ~100% reliab…

It is true. A substantial fraction of the population is immune to the circulating seasonal flu, both through vaccination and previous infection with closely related strains. Only 5-20% of the population gets the flu each year. 60-70% of the population would have to get CoVID-19 before herd immunity brought the reproductive number below 1.

That doesn't make what I'm saying un-true. 20% of the population getting it is enourmous and demonstrates that the effect of herd immunity on the flu is negligible. At 20% infection rate annually after a few years, everyone's had it. But due to the virus propensity to mutate, we don't see herd immunity for the flu. Each new strain resets the counters.

We would see it for COVID. And chances are 15% of us have already had it according to the Gangelt survey.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#332

Post by usaar333 »

arcticbull wrote: post #305
dickjocke wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It's old people AND people with comorbidities, which is a ton of people. 2. Lots of old people, which for Covid is about 65, still work full time jobs. Some of them fly every week. These aren't 95+ year olds. 3. I'm sure people of all ages think their life is very valuable, and very few people consider themselves candidates for sacrifice. Certainly not for privacy concerns. 4. 10x deadlier than the flu.

1. It's old people AND people with comorbidities, which is a ton of people. Yep, and they should shelter in place. Nobody else should. 2. Lots of old people, which for Covid is about 65, still work full time jobs. Some of them fly every week. These aren't 95+ year olds. Yep, and they should shelter in place, because they're in a risk category. 3. I'm sure people of all ages think their life is very valuable, and very…

1. A healthy 30 something has an IFR of something like 0.1%. Doesn't justify a lockdown for a year; does for a couple months.

3. Sweden has experienced over 500 covid deaths in a week. That's a 30% excess death rate. Hardly "fine".

4. I see little evidence it is in line with the flu, unless you are talking about historically deadly flus, not seasonal ones. Flu would not have killed 1.5% of the Diamond Princess population that was infected. 0.7% IFR seems about right (Diamond Princess, Iceland, etc. suggest around this) and that's >7x bad seasonal flu years.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#333

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

ryanobjc wrote: post #302
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry, I might be misunderstanding how loyalty cards work... do they detect each other and report back to home with what other cards they have been in proximity to?

Kinda at the cash register, right?

The cards themselves detect each other without me knowing it?

Checking into to JimmyJohns with a loyalty card is not the same as the guy I passed on the street's phone checking my phone and both letting JimmyJohns HQ that we passed each other at 12:53 on at 643 West Main St.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#334

Post by nradov »

jschwartzi wrote: post #207
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can compel cell phone companies to give this data to the government already Bluetooth has a quite small range, which may give higher tracking precision (to anyone receiving the signal) than the data cell phone companies have.

Bluetooth 5.1 devices can do both distance and direction, so if you have a bunch of beacons you can determine your location to sub-meter accuracy.

This app appears to use peer to peer Bluetooth between phones, not beacons. The intention is to determine relative proximity between users, not absolute position.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#335

Post by im3w1l »

You can troll by falsely claiming to be infected. With strategically placed beacons you could scare a lot of people. If the system is as private as they claim it will be hard to filter out serial trolls.

I suspect they will try to join whatever data is present in your "I'm infected" report (at least IP, idk if there will be other stuff. advertiser id?) with their other databases, using trolls as a justification.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#336

Post by darkwater »

arcticbull wrote: post #305
dickjocke wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It's old people AND people with comorbidities, which is a ton of people. 2. Lots of old people, which for Covid is about 65, still work full time jobs. Some of them fly every week. These aren't 95+ year olds. 3. I'm sure people of all ages think their life is very valuable, and very few people consider themselves candidates for sacrifice. Certainly not for privacy concerns. 4. 10x deadlier than the flu.

1. It's old people AND people with comorbidities, which is a ton of people. Yep, and they should shelter in place. Nobody else should. 2. Lots of old people, which for Covid is about 65, still work full time jobs. Some of them fly every week. These aren't 95+ year olds. Yep, and they should shelter in place, because they're in a risk category. 3. I'm sure people of all ages think their life is very valuable, and very…

Well, in the US for seasonal flu the deaths estimation [1] for this season are 24k-60k deaths, for covid19 is 60k-240k, where 60k is applying lockdown, not "everybody work normally". And obviously they are on top of the typical deaths.

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/09/its-difficult-to-grasp-t...

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#337

Post by arcticbull »

usaar333 wrote: post #332
arcticbull wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It's old people AND people with comorbidities, which is a ton of people. Yep, and they should shelter in place. Nobody else should. 2. Lots of old people, which for Covid is about 65, still work full time jobs. Some of them fly every week. These aren't 95+ year olds. Yep, and they should shelter in place, because they're in a risk category. 3. I'm sure people of all ages think their life is very valuable, and very…

1. A healthy 30 something has an IFR of something like 0.1%. Doesn't justify a lockdown for a year; does for a couple months. 3. Sweden has experienced over 500 covid deaths in a week. That's a 30% excess death rate. Hardly "fine". 4. I see little evidence it is in line with the flu, unless you are talking about historically deadly flus, not seasonal ones. Flu would not have killed 1.5% of the Diamond Princess popula…

> A healthy 30 something has an IFR of something like 0.1%. Doesn't justify a lockdown for a year; does for a couple months.

It's not 0.1% for a 30-something. The Gangelt survey showed a total population fatality rate of 0.37%, and so far the CFR has ranged from 0% in children to 0.1% for 30-somethings to 15% for 85 year olds.

The Gangelt survey showed 0.37% actual vs. a CFR of 2% overall in Germany so we can divide the CFR for each age group likely by 10. It's probably close to 0.01% for a healthy 30-something.

> Sweden has experienced over 500 covid deaths in a week. That's a 30% excess death rate. Hardly "fine".

It ... is fine, when you take into account that they're never going to get it again, whereas every other country in the world is vulnerable to a single person showing up and re-starting the entire process for everyone. It's not this lockdown I'm worried about it's the next one, when a single person shows up in downtown NYC and we're right back at it again.

Hiding inside is not solving the problem because it's an incredibly infectious disease. Unless you can lock down every single person in the entire world for the entire duration, it will fail.

> I see little evidence it is in line with the flu, unless you are talking about historically deadly flus, not seasonal ones. Flu would not have killed 1.5% of the Diamond Princess population that was infected. 0.7% IFR seems about right (Diamond Princess, Iceland, etc. suggest around this) and that's >7x bad seasonal flu years.

The Gangelt survey showed 0.37% vs the flu at 0.1%. It's worse, I've long maintained it's worse, but it's not massively worse. Certainly not stop-the-world worse. [1]

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/09/999015/blood-tes...

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#338

Post by dmarchand90 »

im3w1l wrote: post #335

You can troll by falsely claiming to be infected. With strategically placed beacons you could scare a lot of people. If the system is as private as they claim it will be hard to filter out serial trolls. I suspect they will try to join whatever data is present in your "I'm infected" report (at least IP, idk if there will be other stuff. advertiser id?) with their other databases, using trolls as a justification.

I would imagine it would be possible to only declare one infection per phone/device? If that's possible that should be a sufficient barrier to all but the most dedicated trolls?

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#339

Post by jedieaston »

Jeija wrote: post #298

I've been pondering over the idea of offering the option to use physical device, like e.g. a Bluetooth bracelet, for contact tracing in addition to apps. For contact tracing to have an impact at all, we need a quite large percentage of the population to use one of these apps. Even if 60% of the population had some kind of app installed and this app worked properly, we would still only detect just 36% of all new infec…

Apple's press release seemed to say that much of the functionality will be pushed in the coming months via iOS updates (since the iPhone to iPhone communication isn't exposed normally except for Find my iPhone). It's unlikely that you'll need to install an app except to say you are infected.

Google could do a similar thing via a Google Play Services update (or, you know, use this as the kick-in-the-pants to get manufacturers to start updating Android to protect the public from COVID-19).

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#340

Post by arcticbull »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #330
arcticbull wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moreover, Germany has conducted a randomized serological survey of the population of one town where there was a large outbreak... 1. Results showed 0.37% mortality rate, which is an order of magnitude lower than the fatality rates being published, which is what I claimed -- so I re-iterate: "The numbers we're seeing are an upper-bound, by an order of magnitude." [1] 2. 14% of their town has had it already. [1] 3. T…

> The flu mutates regularly, and there's a ton of strains. ... which a substantial fraction of the population is immune to. Only 5-20% of the population gets the flu each year. CoVID-19 will infect 60-70% of the population, at a minimum, unless measures are taken to contain its spread. > Results showed 0.37% mortality rate, which is an order of magnitude lower than the fatality rates being published I've seen most pe…

> Only 5-20% of the population gets the flu each year.

Only 20% of America is 70,000,000 people. That's staggering. The economic impact of the flu is enormous.

> I've seen most people assuming a mortality around 1%, which is not that far off from these results. In Italy, 1% may well be correct, given how the healthcare system was overwhelmed there.

It may be 1% in Italy because the population of Lombardy was overwhelmingly old, and overwhelmingly sick. The average age of death in Italy was 80.5 and the average number of underlying medical conditions was three.

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