5 ms·

Don’t rely on contact-tracing apps

40 points by dotcoma 6y ago

ryeights 6y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20200515102107/https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/05/16/dont-rely-on-contact-tracing-apps https://web.archive.org/web/20200515102107/https://www.econo...
- daphneokeefe 6y ago
  that archive link is also paywalled
  - ryeights 6y ago
    Huh. I didn't know logins worked on archive.org
jonahbenton 6y ago
http://archive.is/sJLP3 http://archive.is/sJLP3 Unusually confused piece for the Economist, which says govts should not rely on contact tracing apps as silver bullet, as the apps can have incomplete participation, leading to mistaken/dangerous conclusions, plus they give more power to the tech giants. However, it concludes with "In this case, though, Google’s and Apple’s cautious approach is sensible. In a pandemic, experimenting with novel public-health responses such as mass surveillance should be done carefully...."
- keenmaster 6y ago
  Agreed. It’s like when you get an essay prompt in high school English that asks a binary question but you want to be a contrarian so you don’t take either side of the issue and end up presenting some garbled middle ground.
LatteLazy 6y ago
The management of this pandemic, both here in the UK and in the US, has been appallingly poor. We're months in and we still don't really know all the symptoms or the various R values or the mortality rates. It's actually insane how badly we've done.
- jonahbenton 6y ago
  This will be downvoted but- in the US, on a national level, "poor management" is a deliberate choice. The chaos that stems from absence of leadership suits the Chaos Monkey President. Like all grifter/carnival barkers, he despises his customers (marks), whose only option in the absence of information, support, structure, is YOLO, and who will therefore ultimately suffer the most, while continuing to turn to him for his cynical false messaging and identification of an Other to blame for any misfortune. Those who are not under his spell are beaten into apathy by the sheer unrelenting awfulness and the absence of an alternative national strategy other than "vote in November." Even states/regions (like mine, NY) where there is less insulation for incompetent or malignant leadership than at the national level and that are finally proceeding rationally and relatively transparently nevertheless failed to act quickly enough at the start, and continue to be presented with grotesque and criminal obstacles by the national government. It is an appalling state of insanity that we are in, that's for sure.
  - cabaalis 6y ago
    The US health system is not well positioned for command-and-control from a centralized source. This has various advantages and disadvantages, but is a severe hindrance in a pandemic. There wasn't even a unified diagnosis code for COVID until April 1, and that required a herculean effort and a shirking of normal coding update processes. There were various guidances for coding, but identifying diagnosis in structured data for fast analysis was a difficult ask. (I know this to be true, I've done it across the health records of millions of patients.) I'm sure some fault lies in the administration, but my belief is that our health system is systemically unable to properly deal with widespread pandemic, especially from a newly discovered illness. That's one of those trade-offs that have to be considered when looking at how health care in the US should be handled in the future.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

40 points by dotcoma 6y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20200515102107/https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/05/16/dont-rely-on-contact-tracing-apps https://web.archive.org/web/20200515102107/https://www.econo...

daphneokeefe 6y ago
that archive link is also paywalled
- ryeights 6y ago
  Huh. I didn't know logins worked on archive.org

jonahbenton 6y ago

http://archive.is/sJLP3 http://archive.is/sJLP3 Unusually confused piece for the Economist, which says govts should not rely on contact tracing apps as silver bullet, as the apps can have incomplete participation, leading to mistaken/dangerous conclusions, plus they give more power to the tech giants. However, it concludes with "In this case, though, Google’s and Apple’s cautious approach is sensible. In a pandemic, experimenting with novel public-health responses such as mass surveillance should be done carefully...."

keenmaster 6y ago
Agreed. It’s like when you get an essay prompt in high school English that asks a binary question but you want to be a contrarian so you don’t take either side of the issue and end up presenting some garbled middle ground.

LatteLazy 6y ago

The management of this pandemic, both here in the UK and in the US, has been appallingly poor. We're months in and we still don't really know all the symptoms or the various R values or the mortality rates. It's actually insane how badly we've done.

jonahbenton 6y ago
This will be downvoted but- in the US, on a national level, "poor management" is a deliberate choice. The chaos that stems from absence of leadership suits the Chaos Monkey President. Like all grifter/carnival barkers, he despises his customers (marks), whose only option in the absence of information, support, structure, is YOLO, and who will therefore ultimately suffer the most, while continuing to turn to him for his cynical false messaging and identification of an Other to blame for any misfortune. Those who are not under his spell are beaten into apathy by the sheer unrelenting awfulness and the absence of an alternative national strategy other than "vote in November." Even states/regions (like mine, NY) where there is less insulation for incompetent or malignant leadership than at the national level and that are finally proceeding rationally and relatively transparently nevertheless failed to act quickly enough at the start, and continue to be presented with grotesque and criminal obstacles by the national government. It is an appalling state of insanity that we are in, that's for sure.
- cabaalis 6y ago
  The US health system is not well positioned for command-and-control from a centralized source. This has various advantages and disadvantages, but is a severe hindrance in a pandemic. There wasn't even a unified diagnosis code for COVID until April 1, and that required a herculean effort and a shirking of normal coding update processes. There were various guidances for coding, but identifying diagnosis in structured data for fast analysis was a difficult ask. (I know this to be true, I've done it across the health records of millions of patients.) I'm sure some fault lies in the administration, but my belief is that our health system is systemically unable to properly deal with widespread pandemic, especially from a newly discovered illness. That's one of those trade-offs that have to be considered when looking at how health care in the US should be handled in the future.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]