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Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

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Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#51

Post by tpmx »

metachris wrote: post #3

Some context: > The German government has asked SAP and Deutsche Telekom to develop the Corona-Warn-App for Germany as open source software. Deutsche Telekom is providing the network and mobile technology and will operate and run the backend for the app in a safe, scalable and stable manner. SAP is responsible for the app development, its framework and the underlying platform. Therefore, development teams of SAP and…

Wow, those are not two companies that come to mind when "moving fast" is a priority. (I've only worked in a supplier role to Deutsche Telekom, but I can't imagine SAP is any less ... specific about rules and processes.)

I guess they probably have some "experimental" departments for recruitment purposes, they must have used those.

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#52

Post by konschubert »

metachris wrote: post #3

Some context: > The German government has asked SAP and Deutsche Telekom to develop the Corona-Warn-App for Germany as open source software. Deutsche Telekom is providing the network and mobile technology and will operate and run the backend for the app in a safe, scalable and stable manner. SAP is responsible for the app development, its framework and the underlying platform. Therefore, development teams of SAP and…

Ah, the two most expensive, most corporate, software development consultancies Germany has to offer.

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#53

Post by 40four »

Someone wrote: post #17
fabian2k wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest risk are longer contacts, not very short ones. You don't want to notify everyone that passed that person on the street, but you do want to notify everyone that was reasonably close in the same train for half an hour. This is pretty much just an extension to classic contact tracing. And there you also have to work with very rough categories of risk, this isn't so much different.

I don’t see why N S-second contacts would be lower risk than one N×S-second one. This isn’t a matter of ‘small doses can’t harm you’, is it?

Apparently it actually is a matter of the size of the dose. I think it is a misconception a lot of us had early on that any contact at all with the virus would cause infection. Note, we still don’t know what the critical dose is, but small doses should be fought off by a healthy immune system.

An article from the NYT discussing this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/health/coronavirus-transm...

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#54

Post by bla3 »

konschubert wrote: post #52
metachris wrote: post #3

Some context: > The German government has asked SAP and Deutsche Telekom to develop the Corona-Warn-App for Germany as open source software. Deutsche Telekom is providing the network and mobile technology and will operate and run the backend for the app in a safe, scalable and stable manner. SAP is responsible for the app development, its framework and the underlying platform. Therefore, development teams of SAP and…

Ah, the two most expensive, most corporate, software development consultancies Germany has to offer.

Don't disagree, but the GitHub project seems to be run well from a quick glance. Maybe the team is small enough.

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#55

Post by cheschire »

tpmx wrote: post #51
metachris wrote: post #3

Some context: > The German government has asked SAP and Deutsche Telekom to develop the Corona-Warn-App for Germany as open source software. Deutsche Telekom is providing the network and mobile technology and will operate and run the backend for the app in a safe, scalable and stable manner. SAP is responsible for the app development, its framework and the underlying platform. Therefore, development teams of SAP and…

Wow, those are not two companies that come to mind when "moving fast" is a priority. (I've only worked in a supplier role to Deutsche Telekom, but I can't imagine SAP is any less ... specific about rules and processes.) I guess they probably have some "experimental" departments for recruitment purposes, they must have used those.

They probably are funding external "startup" style companies which are outside of the corporate HR and union boundaries.

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#56

Post by bennofs »

Lutger wrote: post #44

Most European countries develop their contract tracing apps as open source software. The fragmented landscape is unfortunate. It's not just the code being developed that could benefit from a cooperative approach, the ethical, legal, medical and governance issues around these apps could benefit a lot from a shared European approach. We have done this with the GDPR, we should collaborate on this as well.

At this scale, collaboration would probably slow things down more than it helps. Finding a consensus among so many parties is hard. Building separate solutions first and then unifying them later might be better.

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#57

Post by [deleted] »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #23
Someone wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see why N S-second contacts would be lower risk than one N×S-second one. This isn’t a matter of ‘small doses can’t harm you’, is it?

Actually it makes a huge difference. You need to absorb a certain amount of payload in oder to get infected. I found this article[1] on the subject extremely enlightening. [1] https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-t...

[deleted]

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#58

Post by blensor »

Someone wrote: post #17
fabian2k wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest risk are longer contacts, not very short ones. You don't want to notify everyone that passed that person on the street, but you do want to notify everyone that was reasonably close in the same train for half an hour. This is pretty much just an extension to classic contact tracing. And there you also have to work with very rough categories of risk, this isn't so much different.

I don’t see why N S-second contacts would be lower risk than one N×S-second one. This isn’t a matter of ‘small doses can’t harm you’, is it?

As far as I understand it not every contact between a Covid19+ and an uninfected person means the uninfected persons gets infected.

For the sake of simplicity lets call each breath the Covid19+ person takes a contact, with a probability that they infect you at 0.5%

The it will make a huge difference if you passing them by or are sitting next to them for an extended period of time.

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#59

Post by arrrg »

tinus_hn wrote: post #46
Schlaefer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if there are 95% false positive: if you're able to test all those people and catch the 5% that might still be a net profit. It comes down to cost. Societies are spending thousands of billions to mitigate the problem, even a slight reduction of that number is a win.

If 20 times as much people as necessary are forced into a useless 14 day quarantine that is not a net profit.

The idea is that aggressive quarantining allows a comfortable return to normalcy for everyone.

Maybe at most a couple 10,000 sent into home isolation (a week should be plenty here, no need for 14 days – we aren’t shooting for perfect anyways) versus 81 million with strong measures.

Obviously the app isn’t the perfect solution here. Much more important is thorough and swift real contact tracing (followed by quarantine irrespective of diagnostics, so quite similar to how the app would work with many false positives). But I wouldn’t reject the app out of hand.

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#60

Post by Someone »

blensor wrote: post #58
Someone wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see why N S-second contacts would be lower risk than one N×S-second one. This isn’t a matter of ‘small doses can’t harm you’, is it?

As far as I understand it not every contact between a Covid19+ and an uninfected person means the uninfected persons gets infected. For the sake of simplicity lets call each breath the Covid19+ person takes a contact, with a probability that they infect you at 0.5% The it will make a huge difference if you passing them by or are sitting next to them for an extended period of time.

That’s exactly what my question is about.

By that model, if you wait long enough, the risk of getting infected by that one person you’re sitting next to approaches p, the fraction of people who are contagious (that person either is contagious, and you’ll get infected, or they aren’t, and you won’t ever get infected) and the risk of infection of serially being in the danger area of multiple persons (effectively taking independent draws of that 0.5% risk) approaches 1.0 (eventually, you’ll have encountered so many contagious persons that you’ll get infected, too)

Typically, you won’t meet enough people on the street to even get close to that 1.0, but it isn’t a given that that probability stays below p.

Things would be different if there were a minimal load (in a simple model, say, of V virus particles in a minute) needed to run the risk of infection. I can see this swing both ways, depending on various factors.

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