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This has absolutely no chance of working in the US. Imagine you go into an average grocery store with 100 average Americans. What percentage of people in that

by cwhiz 6y ago

This has absolutely no chance of working in the US. Imagine you go into an average grocery store with 100 average Americans. What percentage of people in that store have this app on a phone in their pocket? 20% of Americans don’t even own a smartphone. Some non-zero percentage have old phones that won’t work, keep their phones at home, don’t use Bluetooth, don’t know what Bluetooth is, don’t want to use this, don’t trust this, and on and on and on. In Singapore that grocery store would have had approximately 20 contact tracing app users and 80 non users. The end result of this will be.... 1. No confidence that when you receive an alert that you were actually in contact with someone who had Covid. Could have been a troll, someone in a car next to you, a neighboring apartment, etc. 2. No confidence that you weren’t in contact with someone who had Covid. The end result for every user will be the same ambiguity we live with now. We need human contact tracing with real, trained, people making phone calls to other real people based on actual diagnoses of Covid. Not some Silicon Valley pipe dream waste of time that unnecessarily gives people a false sense of hope. This contact tracing app idea will NEVER work in the US.

bhupy 6y ago
> 20% of Americans don’t even own a smartphone. 20% of Americans are children. According to most recent estimates, there are 270.66 MM smartphone users in the US — roughly 82%[1]. Assuming that literal toddlers and poor teenagers do not have smartphones, the vast majority (easily 90+%) of American adults are smartphone users. You also only need ~60% of contacts for contact tracing to be effective [2]. [1] https://internetinnovation.org/general/research-peek-of-the-week-smartphone-users-in-the-us-expected-to-reach-over-270-million-by-2020/ https://internetinnovation.org/general/research-peek-of-the-... [2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6491/eabb6936 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6491/eabb6936
- cwhiz 6y ago
  You used the 2022 number for your calculation. The estimated number for 2020 is 257 million and we can assume that is an EOY number so the actual number would be somewhere between 248M and 257M. If we assume absolute linear growth from 2019 the number as of today would be around 251 million. That's out of ~330 million US citizens for a rate of ~76%. Toddlers, children, and poor teenagers are people that also exist and can be in a grocery store as asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus. I was generous and went with 80%. Your second link is just a study that suggests contact tracing COULD work. But the fact that something could work in theory doesn't mean it will work in practice. I don't know where you got your 60% number from because that number isn't mentioned in that study. I don't think it matters anyway because we won't get anywhere near 60%. Singapore tried this idea and they made it voluntary just like it is being made voluntary in the US. 20-25% of people used it. Now they are trying to make it involuntary by forcing businesses to scan phones at entrances to businesses, schools, and healthcare facilities. Do you really think Americans will accept this? No way. I doubt the legality of this approach in the first place. It would take Donald Trump signing a law to get to 60%. People want this to work because it makes them feel better. Reality has other ideas.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    > That's out of ~330 million US citizens for a rate of ~76%. Toddlers, children, and poor teenagers are people that also exist and can be in a grocery store as asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus. I was generous and went with 80%. Okay sure, but nit-picking that number doesn't change the core argument: you only need 60% for contact tracing to work, according to the most recent research. Remember that the goal here isn't to ensure that NOBODY gets COVID, it's to drive R0 down to < 1. People in grocery stores will still be exposed, but if R0 < 1, then the disease will eventually die out. > Your second link is just a study that suggests contact tracing COULD work. But the fact that something could work in theory doesn't mean it will work in practice. I don't know where you got your 60% number from because that number isn't mentioned in that study. I don't think it matters anyway because we won't get anywhere near 60%. You need to read the full article before attempting to refute it, but I'll help you out. "The efficacy of contact tracing (the y axis of Fig. 3) is the square of the proportion of the population using the app, multiplied by the probability of the app detecting infectious contacts, multiplied by the fractional reduction in infectiousness resulting from being notified as a contact." I've taken a screenshot of the diagram for you: https://imgur.com/ZXPLLxk https://imgur.com/ZXPLLxk The solid black line shows the threshold for epidemic control. While you're right that the paper doesn't claim that it is CERTAIN to work, nobody is sure. In fact, it's odd to me that you are so positive that it WON'T work. "This has absolutely no chance of working in the US." Even scientists don't make claims like this with that level of comical confidence. > Singapore tried this idea and they made it voluntary just like it is being made voluntary in the US. 20-25% of people used it. Now they are trying to make it involuntary by forcing businesses to scan phones at entrances to businesses, schools, and healthcare facilities. Do you really think Americans will accept this? No way. I doubt the legality of this approach in the first place. > It would take Donald Trump signing a law to get to 60%. People want this to work because it makes them feel better. Reality has other ideas. Okay but what happens when Apple and Google build this into the operating system, and contact tracing is always on, like the bluetooth radio, the push notification service, or OS-level location services?
    - cwhiz 6y ago
      > Okay but what happens when Apple and Google build this into the operating system, and contact tracing is always on, like the bluetooth radio, the push notification service, or OS-level location services? They aren’t doing this and have said that they never will. It will be purely voluntary. Are you even going to attempt to refute the absolute failure of this app in Singapore?

by cwhiz 6y ago

bhupy 6y ago

> 20% of Americans don’t even own a smartphone. 20% of Americans are children. According to most recent estimates, there are 270.66 MM smartphone users in the US — roughly 82%[1]. Assuming that literal toddlers and poor teenagers do not have smartphones, the vast majority (easily 90+%) of American adults are smartphone users. You also only need ~60% of contacts for contact tracing to be effective [2]. [1] https://internetinnovation.org/general/research-peek-of-the-week-smartphone-users-in-the-us-expected-to-reach-over-270-million-by-2020/ https://internetinnovation.org/general/research-peek-of-the-... [2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6491/eabb6936 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6491/eabb6936

cwhiz 6y ago
You used the 2022 number for your calculation. The estimated number for 2020 is 257 million and we can assume that is an EOY number so the actual number would be somewhere between 248M and 257M. If we assume absolute linear growth from 2019 the number as of today would be around 251 million. That's out of ~330 million US citizens for a rate of ~76%. Toddlers, children, and poor teenagers are people that also exist and can be in a grocery store as asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus. I was generous and went with 80%. Your second link is just a study that suggests contact tracing COULD work. But the fact that something could work in theory doesn't mean it will work in practice. I don't know where you got your 60% number from because that number isn't mentioned in that study. I don't think it matters anyway because we won't get anywhere near 60%. Singapore tried this idea and they made it voluntary just like it is being made voluntary in the US. 20-25% of people used it. Now they are trying to make it involuntary by forcing businesses to scan phones at entrances to businesses, schools, and healthcare facilities. Do you really think Americans will accept this? No way. I doubt the legality of this approach in the first place. It would take Donald Trump signing a law to get to 60%. People want this to work because it makes them feel better. Reality has other ideas.
- bhupy 6y ago
  > That's out of ~330 million US citizens for a rate of ~76%. Toddlers, children, and poor teenagers are people that also exist and can be in a grocery store as asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus. I was generous and went with 80%. Okay sure, but nit-picking that number doesn't change the core argument: you only need 60% for contact tracing to work, according to the most recent research. Remember that the goal here isn't to ensure that NOBODY gets COVID, it's to drive R0 down to < 1. People in grocery stores will still be exposed, but if R0 < 1, then the disease will eventually die out. > Your second link is just a study that suggests contact tracing COULD work. But the fact that something could work in theory doesn't mean it will work in practice. I don't know where you got your 60% number from because that number isn't mentioned in that study. I don't think it matters anyway because we won't get anywhere near 60%. You need to read the full article before attempting to refute it, but I'll help you out. "The efficacy of contact tracing (the y axis of Fig. 3) is the square of the proportion of the population using the app, multiplied by the probability of the app detecting infectious contacts, multiplied by the fractional reduction in infectiousness resulting from being notified as a contact." I've taken a screenshot of the diagram for you: https://imgur.com/ZXPLLxk https://imgur.com/ZXPLLxk The solid black line shows the threshold for epidemic control. While you're right that the paper doesn't claim that it is CERTAIN to work, nobody is sure. In fact, it's odd to me that you are so positive that it WON'T work. "This has absolutely no chance of working in the US." Even scientists don't make claims like this with that level of comical confidence. > Singapore tried this idea and they made it voluntary just like it is being made voluntary in the US. 20-25% of people used it. Now they are trying to make it involuntary by forcing businesses to scan phones at entrances to businesses, schools, and healthcare facilities. Do you really think Americans will accept this? No way. I doubt the legality of this approach in the first place. > It would take Donald Trump signing a law to get to 60%. People want this to work because it makes them feel better. Reality has other ideas. Okay but what happens when Apple and Google build this into the operating system, and contact tracing is always on, like the bluetooth radio, the push notification service, or OS-level location services?
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    > Okay but what happens when Apple and Google build this into the operating system, and contact tracing is always on, like the bluetooth radio, the push notification service, or OS-level location services? They aren’t doing this and have said that they never will. It will be purely voluntary. Are you even going to attempt to refute the absolute failure of this app in Singapore?