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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

#391

Post by The_Double »

devit wrote: post #341
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…

A simple solution using virus properties would be to just delay the release of the last id. It takes a while before the viral load inside someone becomes high enough to be infectious, so there is no significant harm in the last id being delayed by 24h in the worst case.

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

#392

Post by buboard »

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.

but we would lose herd immunity for the flu

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

#393

Post by mikarv »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #127

This is wonderful news for any surveillance state. As the three-page brief on DP-3T [1] says: "A tech-savvy adversary could reidentify identifiers of infected people that they have been physically close to in the past by i) actively modifying the app to record more specific identifier data and ii) collecting extra information about identities through additional means, such as a surveillance camera to record and ident…

The alternative approach to contact tracing means that a central server can learn most of or the entire of the social graph. This is a considerable reduction of power in comparison.

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

#394

Post by jeremyjh »

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 estimate for the "no mitigation" scenario by the Imperial College is 2.2 million deaths [1] in the US. There is a large range of estimates that have come out since then to take into account the mitigation that has happened and how effective they have been. Lately things have been looking better but without some comprehensive contact tracing and isolation system we cannot "reopen" and drop those mitigations without moving back into the range of hundreds of thousands of casualties.

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/03/18/imperial-college-epidem...

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

#395

Post by est31 »

Saaster wrote: post #383
gok wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

48MB per day just isn't that much these days.

For reference WhatsApp is ~70MB (that's considered small) and a Facebook app is ~380MB on iOS.

Both are one time downloads with comparatively rare updates. Users can visit a place with WiFi for doing the download. The daily dataset of infected users however can't wait for manual prompting and is thus likely downloaded in the background. Users might not always be able to connect their devices to WiFi. In many countries, traffic quotas are quite limited.

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

#396

Post by vanniv »

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...

This actually isn't entirely on top of the typical deaths, as many of the folks dying of COVID are folks that were very likely to have died from their other underlying conditions anyway this year.

Especially now that we are counting all deaths in COVID-positive or presumed-positive individuals as COVID deaths regardless of cause of mortality.

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

#397

Post by astrange »

mrfusion wrote: post #238

I wish we’d just stick with flatten the curve and get in with our lives :-(

Won't work. Lockdowns are like trying to hold your breath for a year. You have to give it up once most of the country is unemployed, or everyone will starve, and eventually infections will be flattened but still not zero.

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

#398

Post by zajio1am »

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…

> 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%

You are comparing apples to oranges and calling it grapes.

It is 0.37% infection fatality rate (including clinically non-significant cases) vs flu 0.1% case fatality rate (from clinically significant cases). case fatality rate for covid-19 is much higher (say 2 % in Germany). Note that these are fatality rates, not mortality rates.

Second factor is that population has no imunity to SARS-CoV-2, while has some immunity to flu strains. Which means much more infected and therefore higher mortality rate even with the same fatality rates.

Overall, it seems to me that without any precautions it would be 10x-25x higher overal mortality (say 0.2 %) than seasonal influenza (say 0.01-0.02 %). Not great, not terrible.

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

#399

Post by arcticbull »

jeremyjh wrote: post #394
darkwater wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 estimate for the "no mitigation" scenario by the Imperial College is 2.2 million deaths [1] in the US. There is a large range of estimates that have come out since then to take into account the mitigation that has happened and how effective they have been. Lately things have been looking better but without some comprehensive contact tracing and isolation system we cannot "reopen" and drop those mitigations withou…

That write-up was based on extremely early CFR data, with no population studies having been conducted at the time. Latest data is pointing to, as I called out, a fatality rate of 1/10th the CFR. This is especially true as we're counting anyone who tested positive for COVID as a COVID death, even if they were hit by a truck.

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

#400

Post by dntbnmpls »

DavideNL wrote: post #174

Am i the only one who thinks it's mindblowing that people use Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, etc. however now that Apple + Google release a tool to prevent thousands of people from dying in a pandemic they start thinking/complaining about the possible privacy implications? (without even having read the specs or knowing the details...)

> Am i the only one who thinks it's mindblowing that people use Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, etc. however now that Apple + Google release a tool to prevent thousands of people from dying in a pandemic they start thinking/complaining about the possible privacy implications?

No. Where have you been? People complain about facebook, instagram, linkedin, etc all the time and encourage others to stop using it all the time.

What is mindblowing is the amount of worship for Apple here and the amount of support this has. And preventing "thousands of people from dying" is no excuse for this because we know this has nothing to do with preventing deaths.

The amount of love that Apple, Microsoft, etc has on every apple/microsoft thread is a tad bit suspect in my opinion.

> (without even having read the specs or knowing the details...)

Why would the specs or details matter? It's a matter of principle.

"People might die" so we need to spy/monitor/track you is a very north korean mindset. But then again, they also use an existential fear ( US invasion ) to enforce complaince amongst their population.

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