Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

> Your lifetime odds in the US of dying in an automotive accident is 1:103 [1].

No they're not. The lifetime odds for the average American are. For opioids as an example, as someone who doesn't use opioids, my lifetime odds of dying from an overdose are essentially nil. The distribution is bimodal.

> This is fair to compare against COVID because due to its extremely limited propensity for mutation, the COVID mortality rate does represent what approximates lifetime risk. (i.e. unlike the flu, you won't get it again).

You claim this with great certainty, but it hasn't been around long enough to know that it won't mutate in annoying ways.

Further, it's still not fair to compare that way. In the past 2 decades, we've had 4 or more dangerous flus that aren't seasonal (SARS, MERS, H1N1, H5N1, COVID-19). Of these, most weren't infectious enough to be super dangerous, but two were (H1N1, COVID-19), each of which killed at least 100K people worldwide, and COVID-19 is on the path to claim a million lives worldwide this year.

That's not a once-in-a-lifetime event, it's once a decade or even once every few years.

> I argue the best testbed is the German study I cited where they actually tested... everyone.

And the flaws in that study have been noted elsewhere. SK is a better testbed since they also tested huge swaths of people, even those not showing symptoms, and

> CFR is not mortality rate

The CFR of the flu is .1%, which would make COVID more contagious, and 30x more deadly. I'm not sure why the mortality rate matters since given the higher infection rate, COVID would have an even higher mortality rate.

> Life's risky, and you're not comparing honestly.

And the risk from COVID goes up if everyone catches it simultaneously. The CFR goes up even further if hospitals are overwhelmed.

This is all case data, not population studies. The Gangelt study is different because they tested the entire population and not just people walking into hospitals. They found the CFR in Germany (2%) was roughly 10X higher than the actual mortality rate in town.

The CFR is always going to suffer from adverse selection bias at this stage because they're only including people sick enough to walk into a hospital, and not folks who were asymptomatic, and not folks who got mild symptoms and didn't tell anyone. That's going to be basically every young person. Only the old end up in hospital and they're dramatically worse hit.

Population studies are not directly comparable. A global CFR of 1.5-2.5% sounds right, but that doesn't mean that's a mortality rate. The mortality rate is closer to 0.37% based on the population study I cited.

You seem to be arbitrarily multiplying and dividing CFR by 2 to fit a narrative. I'd love to see other population data but I think this was the first and only study, which is why the numbers are much different than you're citing.

exactly. do we have data about whether contact tracing of this kind ever worked? S.Korea started testing+tracing somewhere midway in their epidemic, far earlier than where the epidemic is now in france, uk and USA. maybe other countries can benefit from this tracing, but it remains to be proved. In Singapore, which does well, apparently only 6% of ppl installed the contact tracing app. Israel seems to be using carrier data. People seem to be missing the forest in here

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/contact-tr...

> Let’s start with China, where citizens in hundreds of cities have been required to download cellphone software that broadcasts their location to several authorities, including the local police. The app combines geotracking with other data, such as travel bookings, to designate citizens with color codes ranging from green (low risk) to red (high risk). High-risk individuals can be banned from apartment complexes, offices, and even grocery stores. Many human-rights advocates fear that what has been rolled out as a public-health app is moonlighting as a tool of government espionage and mass discrimination.

> Next, let’s look at South Korea, a democracy that has arguably been more successful than any other in containing the spread of the virus. The government uses several sources, such as cellphone-location data, CCTV, and credit-card records, to broadly monitor citizens’ activity. When somebody tests positive, local governments can send out an alert, a bit like a flood warning, that reportedly includes the individual’s last name, sex, age, district of residence, and credit-card history, with a minute-to-minute record of their comings and goings from various local businesses. “In some districts, public information includes which rooms of a building the person was in, when they visited a toilet, and whether or not they wore a mask,” Mark Zastrow, a reporter for Nature, wrote. “Even overnight stays at ‘love motels’ have been noted.”

Bloom filters aren't good for privacy because if there is a hit, you have to upload the id to check it. Which tells the service a) which ID you encountered and b) if it's an ID that was confirmed to be affected, whether you are affected by corona or not, something the system was designed to prevent.

> No they're not. The lifetime odds for the average American are. For opioids as an example, as someone who doesn't use opioids, my lifetime odds of dying from an overdose are essentially nil. The distribution is bimodal.

So now you accept that I wasn't off by 2 orders of magnitude, but are pedantically calling out that I wrote "your" even though I specifically wrote "Your lifetime odds in the US" -- which, if we're going to be entirely pedantic, applies to everyone on earth. Maybe look up your numbers and share them?

You're ignoring how people end up addicted to opioids. The shape of the distribution is both entirely irrelevant and you haven't cited your source.

This makes me think your goal is to win an argument instead of having a genuine discussion.

> You claim this with great certainty, but it hasn't been around long enough to know that it won't mutate in annoying ways.

I'm citing data from experts [1].

> ...we've had 4 or more dangerous flus that aren't seasonal (SARS, MERS, H1N1, H5N1, COVID-19).

SARS, MERS and COVID are not flu viruses, they're coronaviridae. H1N1 and H5N1 are mutations/subtypes of the Influenza A virus. The coronaviridae are different.

> And the flaws in that study have been noted elsewhere. SK is a better testbed since they also tested huge swaths of people, even those not showing symptoms...

SK has not tested huge swaths of the population, they've tested around 1%. [2] They may have tested more than most people, but that's not what you claimed. They've tested some not showing symptoms. Huge difference as compared to testing 100% of the population.

> The CFR of the flu is .1%, which would make COVID more contagious, and 30x more deadly.

The study I referenced mentioned 0.1% for the flu vs 0.37% for COVID. Feel free to read it. That would make it 3.7X not 30X. Because the flu has been around so long the fatality rates are largely determined by mathematical modeling, and are very close to the actual fatality rate. On the other hand, we're still figuring it out for COVID.

Yes, its is more contagious. Nobody's argued that.

> And the risk from COVID goes up if everyone catches it simultaneously. The CFR goes up even further if hospitals are overwhelmed.

Which is why, scroll back up, we isolate the vulnerable.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-coronavirus-isnt-m...

[2] https://www.barrons.com/articles/south-korea-coronavirus-cov...