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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

#341

Post by devit »

The_Double wrote: post #240

There is surprisingly little discussion about the actual spec here. It looks really good to me! - Advertisements change every 15 minutes, are not trackable unless keys are shared. - The only central bit is a repository of "infected" daily keys. - No knowledge about contacts is shared with a central authority. Nothing is shared unless you are infected and decide to share your keys, which are only valid for one day. I…

I think it has a flaw: if you find out you are infected mid-day, then if you reveal your key for the day others can impersonate you for the rest of the day, and if you don't those who you had contact with in the first part of the day won't be notified.

So my suggestion for a minimal fix would be to also reveal all advertised rolling IDs for the current day in addition to the keys for the past days.

A better fix would be to generate ID in a hierarchical fashion from the daily keys with power-of-two-length time slots, so that you only need to share O(d + log(n)) values where d is the number of days and n is the number of subdivisions in a day.

Another potential fix is to use public-key cryptography and only reveal the daily public keys; however, this requires twice as large IDs and matching requires to try to decrypt/signature-check all received IDs instead of being able to generate and lookup.

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

#342

Post by arcticbull »

darkwater wrote: post #336
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…

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...

The German survey showed an actual fatality rate of 0.37% vs the flu at 0.1%. We know herd immunity is in the cards due to the lack of mutation of COVID, and that kicks in at 60-70% of the population.

The German study also suggested up to 15% of people may already have it, so we can further reduce this number (an incremental 45-55% of the population getting infected) -- So, if we run some simple arithmetic, we'll see the number of fatalities will be approximately 60-70K.

This is in line with the number of fatalities in a difficult flu season. The difference is because COVID does not mutate (or has not yet), this will be a one-off, one-time, one-year issue. The flu kills 60,000 each and every year. The Swedes have it right.

We can mitigate this by isolating the vulnerable.

So yes, we are, in fact, overreacting.

[EDIT] I wonder if this is in fact in excess of deaths we'd see anyways. I'd imagine an 80.5 year old with 3 underlying medical conditions (average in Italy of the dead) isn't just as vulnerable to a bad flu as they are to COVID, so if COVID takes them, the flu won't.

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

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

#343

Post by detaro »

arcticbull wrote: post #337
usaar333 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(It's currently (among other points) debated how well the tests used for the Gangelt survey can tell SARS-CoV-2 from other coronaviruses, and given how little they've published unclear how they corrected for that. Hopefully they'll release more info soon, but lots of experts are skeptical of this specific study, they might very well have classified a bunch of folks that had a cold as "corona")

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

#344

Post by rct42 »

bogomipz wrote: post #74

Interesting although it seem as though Singapore's "TraceTogether" app was able to work successfully without any of these APIs no? Tangentially related - Singapore plans to open source their app. There's a few details about how it works here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/26/singapore_tracetoge... Also interesting to read some of the reviews of the app here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sg.go…

They've released their open-source version of the app, OpenTrace

https://github.com/opentrace-community/

Interesting in the Android version they request ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION (i.e., access to GPS) instead of ACCESS_COURSE_LOCATION (i.e., access to BLE). They have also include Firebase analytics (which captures city-level location data) into the app as well.

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

#345

Post by Beefin »

hdjrork wrote: post #140
graeme wrote: post #75

Thinking big, if this works against covid: could it later be used to severely limit or eliminate diseases such as the common cold and the flu? That would be an incredible win for humanity.

Nobody does contact tracing for flu, let alone common cold (which is caused by a bunch of different viruses) Also, common cold mortality is extremely low.

He's saying that because this technology will exist, the possibility will exist. Plus this will no doubt not be the last emerging virus.

To answer your Q, Op: yes. Provided Apple/Google doesn't remove the functionality in a later software update.

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

#346

Post by divbzero »

This is the best news I’ve heard all week.

I had thought that Apple and Google are in the best position to distribute contact tracing widely [1] but couldn’t figure out if they were working on it. It turns out they were.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704460

Big tech can do good and we should applaud their efforts when they do it right.

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

#347

Post by devonproctor »

I'm surprised that there isn't more discussion of leveraging the extensive location data that Google already routinely collects via Android and Google Maps mobile apps.

I'd love any feedback on this simple proposal for a way to enable individuals to contribute their Google location history data to health care organizations: http://covidcontacttracing.com.

This uses public Google APIs and Google Takeout to get raw gps data and inferred semantic locations from Google to COVID-19 response organizations. I've got a prototype that's essentially ready to deploy if anyone has suggestions for potential partners.

I think the Google/Apple proposal is very promising, but I don't see any reason not to also put existing data to work on this problem.

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

#348

Post by ModernMech »

arcticbull wrote: post #317
SkyBelow wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the number of deaths caused by STDs, it is perhaps justifiable for such data to be shared in the same fashion as one's Covid-19 status, assuming the sharing of the latter is justified.

COVID is unlikely dramatically more deadly than the flu, so the question is, if you're okay sharing your health data over COVID, why not the flu? It kills 650,000 people (60,000 Americans) every single year. The reality is widespread panic moments are when we lose our civil rights. Remember 9/11? That year more people died slipping and falling in the shower than died in the twin towers. More people died because they…

> It kills 650,000 people (60,000 Americans) every single year.

That's over a ~6 month season. If you average that out it's 10k per month. We'll have 20k dead tomorrow from covid and it hasn't even peaked yet. This is with extreme lockdown measures implemented. How much worse would those numbers be if everyone was going about their business as usual the way they do the flu?

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

#349

Post by joshuamorton »

lultimouomo wrote: post #325
The_Double wrote: post #240

There is surprisingly little discussion about the actual spec here. It looks really good to me! - Advertisements change every 15 minutes, are not trackable unless keys are shared. - The only central bit is a repository of "infected" daily keys. - No knowledge about contacts is shared with a central authority. Nothing is shared unless you are infected and decide to share your keys, which are only valid for one day. I…

One issue I see is that when I query the central repository of infected IDs I expose to the central server the IDs I've been in contact with (unless I always download all of them, but that doesn't seem feasible). It seems like this could be solved by providing a K-anonymous query interface like the one exposed by Have I Been Pwned. I wrote to the contact email address of Pepp-Py, which is a European initiative do dev…

Ah you mentioned the HIBP example, although for this search space you may be able to get by with just a download of all of them. If you stick to, say, state by state sharding, you get around 30 MB of hashes for the worst case (NYC).

If you further reduce that by only providing new confirmed hashes since a timestamp, the client can track when they last downloaded the data and pull only the delta, you end up with a few MB a day, which compares quite well to say, a video call.

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

#350

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

arcticbull wrote: post #340
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 overwhel…

> Only 20% of America is 70,000,000 people. That's staggering.

So imagine 4x as many people getting infected with a virus that is many times as lethal.

> It may be 1% in Italy because the population of Lombardy was overwhelmingly old, and overwhelmingly sick.

And the US has other problems, such as obesity. But the mortality will be much higher wherever the virus overwhelms healthcare systems. As we've seen, that can happen very quickly.

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