4 ms·

In my humble opinion, this platform aims to track if people had got contact by bluetooth with other people that might have the virus. The virus can remain in s

In my humble opinion, this platform aims to track if people had got contact by bluetooth with other people that might have the virus. The virus can remain in surfaces up to 3 days(https://www.immedicohospitalario.es/noticia/18729/new-coronavirus-stable-for-hours-on-surfaces https://www.immedicohospitalario.es/noticia/18729/new-corona...). With bluetooth you can not track the surfaces, so the ratio of false positives and false negatives will be high. The best way to stop possible infections remains in individual measures anyone can take. For this reason, I think that the objective of this platform is to track people, not stop the virus.

chispamed 7y ago
That's a logical fallacy. This app not being able to prevent all possible infections and having false positives / false negatives does not automatically mean that its sole purpose is to track users. There are multiple scientific studies that support the use of an app as one of many measures for ending the lockdown which already takes away many basic rights at the moment. Even though viral RNA can be found on surfaces after hours this does not mean that surfaces are an important vector for transmission and all studies so far point in the opposite direction. What is very concerning however is that close to 50% of all tranmissions happen during the first few days of infection when the host is not experiencing any symptoms. In the absence of symptoms and given the many limitations of personal follow-up through the authorities (which gives them much more data on your person than this app ever could btw) an automatic notification system is the only way short of a complete shutdown to quarantine infected but currently asymptomatic patients and halt the spread of the virus. Privacy-wise you would be worse of in any other situation as well. Do you want the shutdown to continue and police to be able to control you at any time when you leave your appartement? Do you want government workers asking the infected who they have been in contact with during the last weeks and them to give your name, address and contact details to the government? Do you want the economical crisis to continue and people to have to share all possible details with the government in order to get unemployment benefits? Also, Apple and Google already control your operating system and have much more data on you than this app could provide them with through their OSs and all their apps. What they could gain would at most be the knowledge of wether you could have been in contact with an infected person. Leaving aside that their system as outlined atm would not even allow them to do that, what would they gain? For most people there won't be any lasting effects so there ara no charateristics inherent to the group that can be targeted. It will also affect a huge chunk of the world's population, chances are that most people will have to quarantine at some point and then that data will be almost worthless.
- kujaomega 7y ago
  > all studies so far point in the opposite direction Do you have any source of this information? > close to 50% of all tranmissions happen during the first few days What's the source of this information?
  - chispamed 7y ago
    For the second point, take a look at these studies: Ferretti et al. (2020). Quantifying dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests that epidemic control and avoidance is feasible through instantaneous digital contact tracing. Science. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/science.abb6936.abstract https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/scie... Ganyani, Tapiwa, et al. "Estimating the generation interval for COVID-19 based on symptom onset data." medRxiv (2020). https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031815v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031815v... The first study also touches on the point of transmission through surfaces which they argue should be at the very most 10% of all cases but probably less and a German virologist who's one of the leading experts in coronaviruses, Prof. Dr. Drosten, said that he and many others believe that surface transmission is almost negligible: https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/coronaskript162.pdf https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/coronaskript162.pdf (in German).

chispamed 7y ago

That's a logical fallacy. This app not being able to prevent all possible infections and having false positives / false negatives does not automatically mean that its sole purpose is to track users. There are multiple scientific studies that support the use of an app as one of many measures for ending the lockdown which already takes away many basic rights at the moment. Even though viral RNA can be found on surfaces after hours this does not mean that surfaces are an important vector for transmission and all studies so far point in the opposite direction. What is very concerning however is that close to 50% of all tranmissions happen during the first few days of infection when the host is not experiencing any symptoms. In the absence of symptoms and given the many limitations of personal follow-up through the authorities (which gives them much more data on your person than this app ever could btw) an automatic notification system is the only way short of a complete shutdown to quarantine infected but currently asymptomatic patients and halt the spread of the virus. Privacy-wise you would be worse of in any other situation as well. Do you want the shutdown to continue and police to be able to control you at any time when you leave your appartement? Do you want government workers asking the infected who they have been in contact with during the last weeks and them to give your name, address and contact details to the government? Do you want the economical crisis to continue and people to have to share all possible details with the government in order to get unemployment benefits? Also, Apple and Google already control your operating system and have much more data on you than this app could provide them with through their OSs and all their apps. What they could gain would at most be the knowledge of wether you could have been in contact with an infected person. Leaving aside that their system as outlined atm would not even allow them to do that, what would they gain? For most people there won't be any lasting effects so there ara no charateristics inherent to the group that can be targeted. It will also affect a huge chunk of the world's population, chances are that most people will have to quarantine at some point and then that data will be almost worthless.

kujaomega 7y ago
> all studies so far point in the opposite direction Do you have any source of this information? > close to 50% of all tranmissions happen during the first few days What's the source of this information?
- chispamed 7y ago
  For the second point, take a look at these studies: Ferretti et al. (2020). Quantifying dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests that epidemic control and avoidance is feasible through instantaneous digital contact tracing. Science. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/science.abb6936.abstract https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/scie... Ganyani, Tapiwa, et al. "Estimating the generation interval for COVID-19 based on symptom onset data." medRxiv (2020). https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031815v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031815v... The first study also touches on the point of transmission through surfaces which they argue should be at the very most 10% of all cases but probably less and a German virologist who's one of the leading experts in coronaviruses, Prof. Dr. Drosten, said that he and many others believe that surface transmission is almost negligible: https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/coronaskript162.pdf https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/coronaskript162.pdf (in German).