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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

#361

Post by joshuamorton »

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…

> The lifetime risk of death being involved in a car accident is 1%.

You're off by a factor of 100. It's .01%.

> The lifetime risk of dying of an opioid overdose is 2%.

For who? Someone who uses opioids? Maybe, on average, again you're off by a factor of 100 or more.

> We do not know how deadly it is, all we know is that of people who go to the hospital

No, of people who test positive, which includes people with relatively mild symptoms that don't go to the hospital, but had reason or ability to get tested.

South Korea is probably the best current testbed here, they had very widespread testing and they've had very, very slow growth recently so the CFR numbers are probably relatively accurate. They see a 3% CFR.

> Which is why Sweden remains open for business. And you know what? They're doing just fine [1].

Normalized by population, Sweden has seen more deaths and more infections than California, by about 50%, and it will likely continue to grow at a similar rate. The problem with exponential growth is that things look like they're doing just fine until suddenly they aren't and there's no way to fix things.

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

#362

Post by three_seagrass »

nradov wrote: post #334
jschwartzi wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tracking isn't just by connection. Their point is that bluetooth tracking (by beacon or otherwise) is already a thing - many major retailers and franchises already do it.

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

#363

Post by arcticbull »

usaar333 wrote: post #353
arcticbull wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

We have to be pretty careful about demographic adjustments. Does the town surveyed have any nursing homes or hospitals? If not, that'll drastically drop the death rate. By my napkin math, you get to about a 2-fold difference which explains the 0.37% vs. 0.7% numbers. But remember the flu 0.1% also includes those highly susceptible people.

Heh, the delta is likely because: (1) Iceland has had 6 deaths so it's way, way too early to draw any conclusions from Iceland and (2) everyone onboard the Diamond Princess was onboard a cruise ship, and cruises tend to skew old. The median age of passengers was 69. That age group is affected ~100X harder than young folks (9% CFR vs 0.1% CFR) [1]. If you've got more data to back 0.7% please do share but I've found none compelling so far.

Although for what it's worth Iceland is showing 6 deaths and 1600 confirmed cases for a fatality rate of --- wait for it --- 0.35%.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e3.htm#T1_down

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

#364

Post by three_seagrass »

serf wrote: post #326
Simon_says wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I wasn’t using my battery anyways.

none of the proposed tracking methods are without additional battery consumption, as far as I can tell..

Just have everyone wear QR code name tags

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

#365

Post by olliej »

jedberg wrote: post #115
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #100

Promising opt-in is a bit disingenuous. These tech giants are creating a technological capability. Whether or not it is opt-in, opt-out or mandatory is then decided by governments, now and in the future. This is of course nothing new. But it's worth noting considering how high the tolerance for extremely intrusive government action currently is and how extremely weak any resistance is bound to be. I'm not saying I'm…

They already have the shiny button. They can compel cell phone companies to give this data to the government already, without you knowing about it. At least this way you will get some control of the info and you'll know what was collected and have control of it's disclosure (for now). In other words, this is no worse than what the government is already capable of, it just makes it easier for you to share the data wit…

The protocol is explicitly designed to not share information - the data does not contain location information, and the only thing that someone can do with that data is verify if they have seen some of the identifiers that were published by someone else.

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

#366

Post by deanBlunt »

arcticbull wrote: post #352
ModernMech wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Well, a study of a German town showed 15% are already immune/have had it and a mortality rate of 0.37% vs the flu at 0.1%. [1] If you run the numbers and project that onto the US population we'd see an incremental 600K deaths this year. Unlike the flu, which mutates aggressively and recurs, we haven't seen much mutation of COVID. That means, unlike the flu which will kill 60K next year, and the following and so on, t…

Your citation says nothing about mutations, yet it’s placement seems to indicate that is included.

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

#367

Post by usaar333 »

arcticbull wrote: post #363
usaar333 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to be pretty careful about demographic adjustments. Does the town surveyed have any nursing homes or hospitals? If not, that'll drastically drop the death rate. By my napkin math, you get to about a 2-fold difference which explains the 0.37% vs. 0.7% numbers. But remember the flu 0.1% also includes those highly susceptible people.

Heh, the delta is likely because: (1) Iceland has had 6 deaths so it's way, way too early to draw any conclusions from Iceland and (2) everyone onboard the Diamond Princess was onboard a cruise ship, and cruises tend to skew old. The median age of passengers was 69. That age group is affected ~100X harder than young folks (9% CFR vs 0.1% CFR) [1]. If you've got more data to back 0.7% please do share but I've found no…

My numbers generally comes from https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3....

That paper would give about 3% for a 70 year old. But remember that cruise passengers are healthy enough to be on cruises. 1.5% death rate seems about reasonable when you correct for that (again, this is where you might see that 2x difference).

Iceland has a considerable number of unresovled cases. Whether you use 7 deaths out of 751 recovered, or 20% hospitalization death rate, you get somewhere on the order of 0.9% CFR.

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

#368

Post by arcticbull »

arcticbull wrote: post #352
ModernMech wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Well, a study of a German town showed 15% are already immune/have had it and a mortality rate of 0.37% vs the flu at 0.1%. [1] If you run the numbers and project that onto the US population we'd see an incremental 600K deaths this year. Unlike the flu, which mutates aggressively and recurs, we haven't seen much mutation of COVID. That means, unlike the flu which will kill 60K next year, and the following and so on, t…

@deanBlunt my bad, updated.

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

#369

Post by olliej »

crishoj wrote: post #168
snarf21 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This functionality is already live in Find My iPhone. iPhones are performing these associations already. The bigger change is Android joining and sharing the data with researchers.

The proposed technology is quite different from a service that located located devices. Rather, it would track what devices have been in proximity of each other, and not necessarily where.

it doesn't track which phones are next to each other, just identifiers it has seen. Those identifiers roll frequently, and the material to find contact only occurs if a person chooses to publish that information, and all that information does is say what their keys were.

Determining if you were in the vicinity is also done on device - you get a list of all the day keys from a person who has chosen to share that information, then from that you can create all the keys they would have used in that period, and see if your device has ever seen one of those keys. Presumably if it finds a match the device/app would post a "you should get tested" message.

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

#370

Post by djrogers »

anigbrowl wrote: post #234
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #100

Promising opt-in is a bit disingenuous. These tech giants are creating a technological capability. Whether or not it is opt-in, opt-out or mandatory is then decided by governments, now and in the future. This is of course nothing new. But it's worth noting considering how high the tolerance for extremely intrusive government action currently is and how extremely weak any resistance is bound to be. I'm not saying I'm…

how high the tolerance for extremely intrusive government action You could also view it as high demand for government functionality, with an accompanying commandeering of the governmental power by the public, which has leverage of its own. Consider, for example, that 1/3 of the country is on a rent strike right now, a proportion which will likely grow. That part of the polity is learning to flex its political muscle…

> Consider, for example, that 1/3 of the country is on a rent strike right now

Errr - no, no they aren’t. This month had approximately 12% more people miss their rent payment than last April.

That’s high - and bad news for people like my retired aunt and uncle, or father in law, who rely on the income from their rental property - but it’s hardly a national rent strike.

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