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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

#451

Post by tastroder »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #441
jimbokun wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's being used to fight something even more awful. There are no good choices in a pandemic.

This is a false dichotomy and assumes there are only two choices: - not handling the pandemic - tracking the population You can get information about people assembling in other ways: - helicopters - intel gathering - cops and army patrolling dressed as civilian - create groups of citizen in town responsible to patrolling And probably many I don't know about. Then you add to that: keeping to communicate with the publi…

There's no pretending there is no other choice, this already is a proposal for that "other choice". Contact tracing certainly isn't new, it's a required step in tackling many infectious diseases and will happen whether or not it is assisted by digital means. The technical alternatives to the tiny part proposed here are coarse and many of them more invasive in terms of privacy. This proposal is specifically designed to prevent tracking populations, it also limits the number of necessary off switches to the two OS vendors. What exactly is the part of the "new normal" you are worried about here? I hope it's not people walking around with tracking beacons in their pocket, they already do that without giving it a single thought.

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

#452

Post by vsl »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #441
jimbokun wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's being used to fight something even more awful. There are no good choices in a pandemic.

This is a false dichotomy and assumes there are only two choices: - not handling the pandemic - tracking the population You can get information about people assembling in other ways: - helicopters - intel gathering - cops and army patrolling dressed as civilian - create groups of citizen in town responsible to patrolling And probably many I don't know about. Then you add to that: keeping to communicate with the publi…

It’s not about “people assembling” at all. It’s about individual prolonged contacts, possibly accidental (mass transit), with an infected person, allowing much more targeted (as opposed to current blunt tools like shelter at home orders) suppression of the disease.

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

#453

Post by vsl »

sneak wrote: post #437
dmak wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a pandemic, I think it’s fair to value public safety over privacy. What comes after the pandemic is a separate concern and discussion.

Public safety is not a human right, while privacy is. If we abandon our commitments to human rights in times of crisis, how important are they to us, really?

> Public safety is not a human right, while privacy is.

Seriously? “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person” is literally Article 3 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights - and 1&2 are “this applies to everyone; yes, we mean it”. Privacy is all the way down in Article 12.

I’ll take my life, health and freedom, for which targeted suppression of this disease is essential, over my privacy any time, thank you very much.

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

#455

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

arcticbull wrote: post #403
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If we, again, assume that 15% of the US has already had it (as in Gangelt), and that herd immunity kicks in at 60-70%, that means we'd expect to see another 45-55% of the population -- 147-179 million cases. If we actually isolate the vulnerable, basically nobody would die.

That would be an incorrect assumption. The Gangelt study is about one small town in Germany where there was a known superspreading event at the Carnival festival.

If 15% of the US had already been infected, then based on the Gangelt study, there would be 200 thousand deaths, and millions hospitalized with severe illness.

You're completely misreading the Gangelt study.

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

#456

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

arcticbull wrote: post #331
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true. A substantial fraction of the population is immune to the circulating seasonal flu, both through vaccination and previous infection with closely related strains. Only 5-20% of the population gets the flu each year. 60-70% of the population would have to get CoVID-19 before herd immunity brought the reproductive number below 1.

That doesn't make what I'm saying un-true. 20% of the population getting it is enourmous and demonstrates that the effect of herd immunity on the flu is negligible. At 20% infection rate annually after a few years, everyone's had it. But due to the virus propensity to mutate, we don't see herd immunity for the flu. Each new strain resets the counters. We would see it for COVID. And chances are 15% of us have already…

Without pre-existing immunity, a much larger fraction of the population would get flu each year. That's one of the primary reasons why people worry about pandemic flu, as opposed to the regular seasonal flu. An entirely new strain has the potential to infect a much larger share of the population than the regular seasonal flu, precisely because there's no pre-existing immunity.

> chances are 15% of us have already had it according to the Gangelt survey.

No, that's a completely unfounded conclusion to draw from that study. Gangelt was chosen precisely because it was an extremely hard-hit town. Researchers wanted wanted good statistics, so they went to the place that has the largest case density. There was an early superspreading event in Gangelt, during Carnival celebrations back in February. Hundreds of people came into close contact with a known infected person. The population of the town is only 12,000 to begin with.

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

#457

Post by chispamed »

lultimouomo wrote: post #450
joshuamorton wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Geographical based sharding seems to break down once people travel though. Just a single visit to a hub airport might have gotten you in contact with people form all around the world (I assume that the objective of this initiative is to try and get us at least part way back to normal). Even if you don't travel, but other people are, you will be in contact with people who are registered as infected in a different regi…

You could still have geo sharding if the device also saved the location locally and shared the diagnosis for every zone it’s been in / downloaded the data for all zones. Ofc that would mean more data to process for travelers but it should still be way less than the data of the entire globe.

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

#458

Post by akiselev »

lwf wrote: post #413
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.

Realistically, what does sub-metre accuracy help with "evil" (catch-all for all non-disease-related) surveillance that, say, a 5-10m is insufficient for?

Hyper localized association. Like, for example, a dissident organizing a local chapter of some organization who disperses information via in person hand offs of handwritten papers every. In this example, their hand off point, in a small town of tens of thousands, is the Saturday farmers' market that runs from 8 until 5 or so. They and their conspirators all went to the farmers' market regularly before so it's completely natural for them to appear within 5-10 meters of each other a few Saturdays a month (usually because the three most popular food trucks have long lines right next to each other). Except now "evil" can roll up the ringleader and see a pattern of who passed within an arm's reach every time the ringleader got a message from the head organization without actually spending the resources to surveil anyone in person.

"Evil" usually doesn't care enough about most people to spend significant resources surveiling them. The danger in dropping that threshold is that "evil" invents new ways to exploit any efficiency.

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

#459

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

arcticbull wrote: post #399
jeremyjh wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With a CFR of 0.4%, 1 million Americans would die.

Of course, if more than 200 million Americans came down with CoVID-19 in a short span of time, the health system would collapse.

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

#460

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

vanniv wrote: post #396
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...

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.

The spike in mortality across northern Italy contradicts your claim that these people would have died anyways this year.
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