16 ms·

Nearly 40% of Icelanders are using a Covid app, but it hasn’t helped much

157 points by jtbayly 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dogma1138 6y ago
Iceland is quite unique, only one real large population center, limited public transport, tiny venues, multi-generational homes and overall a tiny population so it doesn’t seem to be the prime candidate for contact tracing apps since it’s effectively the best case scenario for traditional contact tracing.
- __s 6y ago
  For reference, https://icelandmag.is/article/capita-champion-world https://icelandmag.is/article/capita-champion-world Also most chess GMs per capita, 2nd most cars per capita, it goes on..
  - Someone 6y ago
    That’s just the law of small countries (just made up that term). It’s easier for smaller entities to be an outlier. You’ll find about the same positive as negative ones, though. If you were to split a large country such as the USA or China into parts with a third of a million people, chances are that, for any of these, there would be a parts that beats Iceland. There may be exceptions such as the highest usage of hydro-power usage, as they have a rather unique geology. Vatican City won’t be beat on popes per km², either (it has just over two)
    - pedrocr 6y ago
      > Vatican City won’t be beat on popes per km², either (it has just over two) Just over 4 actually. There are 2 popes in 0.49 km^2 so 4.1.
      - Someone 6y ago
        Depends on your definition of pope. There’s only one bishop of Rome/head of the Catholic Church in Vatican City. Benedict XVI now is ‘pope emeritus’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_in_the_Catholic_Church#Pope_emeritus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_in_the_Catholic_Church#...)
    - smnrchrds 6y ago
      Remember the year Vatican city was the murder capital of the world by a large margin? It had 256 murders per 100,000 inhabitants [0]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/g77wwj/oc_the_homicide_rate_in_vatican_city/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/g77wwj/oc_...
    - kgwgk 6y ago
      > It’s easier for smaller entities to be an outlier. The Most Dangerous Equation Ignorance of how sample size affects statistical variation has created havoc for nearly a millennium https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/91c1/f00095ca156ea39fe0f225882977b8fa0167.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/91c1/f00095ca156ea39fe0f225...
- dredds 6y ago
  NZ is also postponing app tracing as our cases hit zero, and our PM recommends old school ppl power. (200 tracers on standby with more being trained just in case)
  - Trasmatta 6y ago
    NZ and Iceland may be unique, but I am extremely skeptical about tracking apps being useful at all elsewhere, in comparison to large teams of trained contact tracers.
    - eloff 6y ago
      I'm skeptical of the idea with regard to civil liberties, but I don't see why one would doubt it's efficacy. It's a tool to make the contract tracers more productive, and I expect it will be fit for purpose.
      - exmadscientist 6y ago
        The biggest problem with contact tracing apps is that contact tracing in general is not very effective when the case rate is high. Its ideal use is to deal with the first case arriving in an isolated area. The sixth wave in the heart of NYC, not so useful. This means that the scalability advantages of tech don't synergize well with the uses of contact tracing. If you don't have very many cases to worry about, a dedicated team of humans will do just as well. And not have nearly the same long-term privacy issues.
        Reelin 6y ago
        > a dedicated team of humans will do just as well That seems unlikely to me given that no jurisdiction has unlimited resources, not everything is captured on camera, patient's memories aren't perfect, and there may be incentives to lie or otherwise under-report certain contacts when things aren't completely anonymous. (For example, in many countries patients are likely to avoid revealing contact with a drug dealer.) In comparison, DP-3T (and also the joint Apple-Google framework based on an earlier revision of it) will capture any significant contact provided that both parties are carrying appropriate devices. It also maintains anonymity, so it removes nearly all incentives to mis- or under- report. It's not a replacement for teams of people, but it should provide significant improvements in areas where the majority of people are carrying such devices. > And not have nearly the same long-term privacy issues. Neither DP-3T, the Apple-Google framework, or the TCN protocol have any significant privacy implications (beyond whatever is already associated with carrying the physical device doing the tracing, and to the best of my knowledge of course).
- triyambakam 6y ago
  Contact tracing is not needed - identify the people at high risk and protect them from the virus. People at low risk should be expected to circulate the virus and develop immunity. Contract tracing among low risk defeats the purpose. If we're ever going to get our lives back, and not be on indefinite timeline of "maybe there will be a highly effective vaccine" we actually need the virus to circulate among people who can safely get it, get over it, make antibodies which historically - before the advent of highly effective vaccines - is how pandemics ended. Total isolation policies prevent broad population immunity. We know from decades of medical science that the population develops immunity while acquiring antibodies.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    That depends on the disease. Is there any proof that people develop immunity to covid 19 after getting it?
    - bad_user 6y ago
      We don't have evidence due to disease being so new, but there's enough reason to suspect we'll develop at least short term neutralizing immunity. But yes, caution is necessary. We don't have enough evidence to push forward a national strategy that's based on people developing immunity without a vaccine. Here's WHO's statement on this matter: https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-passports-in-the-context-of-covid-19 https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-p... "Herd immunity" without a vaccine, as a strategy, is equivalent with doing nothing and let the virus wreak havoc on the population.
      - tomp 6y ago
        Risk vs reward. If there is immunity, then developing herd immunity sooner rather than later is important (even more so if there's immunity but it's only short-term). If there's no immunity, we're, excuse the expression, fucked anyhow. Can vaccines even be developed if there's no natural immunity?
- dehrmann 6y ago
  All the interesting places people have been pointing to are islands. Except South Korea, but it's effectively an island.
  - adventured 6y ago
    Also one of the primary reasons Hawaii only has 17 deaths and 637 positives.
  - manquer 6y ago
    South Korea is this context similar to an island . While it is peninsula the only land border is with North Korea and highly guarded , effectively you can only enter by flying in just like an island.
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      Not just flying. South Korea is also connected to Russia, China and Japan by ferry.
      - wigl 6y ago
        Not sure about the Russia and China routes but the Busan-Shimonoseki ferry is pretty impractical. 13 hrs and about as expensive as a flight. More if you consider train costs from Shimonoseki.
        9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
        Busan-Fukuoka ferries go directly between two huge cities and are priced competitively, particularly if you get a cabin instead of paying for a hotel.
        wigl 6y ago
        Wow the JR Beetle is super fast! Didn't know about that, my knowledge is pretty old, thanks!
- CathedralBorrow 6y ago
  > multi-generational homes Can you clarify what you mean by this?
  - llarsson 6y ago
    That typically means grandma lives with your family in her old age, rather then by herself or in some old folks home.
    - meheleventyone 6y ago
      This isn’t typical at least in my decade of living in Iceland.
    - CathedralBorrow 6y ago
      Ah, thanks. Iceland is whatever you call the opposite of that. Grandma very rarely lives with her family, she lives by herself -- hopefully with her partner -- until she is unable to and then moves into a system that ranges from living-alone-with-help to typical old folks homes, and will gradually move towards more care as her health allows. So that's wrong in the original comment, but the rest seemed pretty spot on to me, and doesn't change the argument much I think.
      - gramakri 6y ago
        The opposite is nuclear family I think
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Iceland is so unique that the primary dating app considers incest as a risk factor. That’s not a thing most population groups need to worry about.
  - kleton 6y ago
    That was more of a joke app that the foreign press got very excited about.
- swebs 6y ago
  And the population of the entire country is 360,000 people.
- rurban 6y ago
  I would doubt that. If I remember the Iceland outbreak map correctly, they had two isolated outbreak centers, far away from each other. One in Reykjavik center and the 2nd in a small town outside. I would definitely like to know if my village is suddenly affected or not. They already did the very first traditional contact tracing, worldwide. We know a lot from this data. And they also did tracing via the mutating generations. Full scale.
user_50123890 6y ago
This reassures the hypothesis that you probably won't catch the virus from a brief contact in a grocery store or similar if you keep your distance. Infections happen within families, and spread from one family to another by friends/coworkers. The infected people should be easily able to list all exposed out by name. An exception is of course mass indoors public events that are forbidden now. This is where a contact tracing app would probably prove to be the most useful.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 6y ago
  Incidental contact is unlikely to matter in most cases. However, multiple people at different tables where infected at a restaurant from a single customer. So, it doesn’t take that much.
  - eloff 6y ago
    Or on public transport. New York's subway system was probably it's Achilles heel during this outbreak.
    - dehrmann 6y ago
      Except Staten Island had the second most cases per capita. Lots of the obvious NYC theories have holes where you look at places affected.
      - jmull 6y ago
        People who live or work on Staten Island used mta services, including subways, heavily.
      - adrianmonk 6y ago
        Maybe ferries cause the same kinds of problems as subways do.
barbegal 6y ago
This app tracks users’locations using GPS data and according to the article "allows investigators—with permission—to look at whether those with a positive diagnosis are potentially spreading the disease" Without also being able to know the location of people without a positive diagnosis, the app probably doesn't help that much. But I don't think this necessarily applies to apps being developed for other countries where Bluetooth is being used to measure person to person contact directly. This article lacks any real insight into what isn't working or why.
- jonastryggvi 6y ago
  I've heard that the app was useful to refresh people's memory when doing contact tracing, but as the cases went down quickly after the app was released then it might not have been a gamechanger. the app is open source of people are interested; https://github.com/aranja/rakning-c19-app https://github.com/aranja/rakning-c19-app
- Kephael 6y ago
  Couldn't you DDoS this infrastructure by having beacons masquerade as users and then have people quarantined because they were marked as near an infected individual when in reality they were near a rogue beacon that spams generated identifiers? This certainly can't be constitutional in any Western system of government. Even if the identifiers were encrypted with a public key that only the tracer service had the private key to, couldn't a bad actor register as a bunch of actual people and then have them show as coming in contact with infected people?
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    Or DDoS society.
  - jmull 6y ago
    No. All this app does is record a user’s location for the last two weeks. Then, after a positive diagnosis, that location data is examined as an aid to help determine who that person may have come into contact with. Beacons, identifiers, constitutions, and public keys don’t come into it.
jonastryggvi 6y ago
here is the covid19 info website in iceland, if anyone is interested in how many tests have been done and other statistics; https://www.covid.is/data https://www.covid.is/data
- krzyk 6y ago
  Wow, it looks like Iceland recovered from it pretty fast. Only 6 active cases
  - dredds 6y ago
    The next issue is whether to count positives who are new arrivals placed into quarantine of 2 or more weeks. Countries will be reluctant to blemish their clean virus-free records even though quarantine may be effective and necessary to have limited allowable travel. Seems we should only count people who test positive after passing through quarantine if they were first cleared as negative and released.
duxup 6y ago
I wonder how much it would. There's a chance that a chance encounter would result in an infection. But then how many data points of low probability events are useful?
pizza 6y ago
Something I've been thinking about during lockdown is that, while we are for the most part staying at home when possible, if you get sick, you only have, maybe, 4 or 5 contacts to trace, on average. If we release lockdown, the number of average contacts to trace goes way way up.
- w3mmpp 6y ago
  If you lock people up in solitary confinement they won't catch it at all. See the problem with your logic here?
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    If we did just that for three weeks all of this would be over.
    - w3mmpp 6y ago
      Today for the coronavirus, tomorrow for what else?
      - z3rgl1ng 6y ago
        The coronavirus. Weren’t you paying attention? They said three weeks.
      - trickstra 6y ago
        Would be nice if we printed some trillions to eradicate smoking. It would still save more lives than corona claimed - 8 million in 2017 https://ourworldindata.org/smoking#smoking-is-one-of-the-leading-risks-for-early-death https://ourworldindata.org/smoking#smoking-is-one-of-the-lea...
    - defnotashton2 6y ago
      Noooo, it wouldn't be that simple. If it would be, we would all be able to eradicate several viruses..
  - 6y ago
cwhiz 6y ago
Only 33% of Americans would consider using a contract tracing app. https://www.axios.com/axios-ipsos-coronavirus-week-9-contact-tracing-bd747eaa-8fa1-4822-89bc-4e214c44a44d.html https://www.axios.com/axios-ipsos-coronavirus-week-9-contact...
- raggi 6y ago
  Sure, but equivalent tracing teams in some of the bad us cities would have two to three orders of magnitude higher case load per team member. The "traditional methods" like making phone calls as described in the article do not work at that scale. Yes testing and many other things are more effective, and tracing is less useful if you've effectively got rates down to manageable levels, but at unmanaged levels, automation _could_ really help. New York has more new cases per day than Iceland has handled in total.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    It doesn’t matter. People don’t trust the apps and won’t use them. Singpore has 20% and Iceland now 40%.
- phyzome 6y ago
  It would definitely depend on the app, for me! There are better and worse ways of doing this, along both privacy and security axes. (...if I even used a smartphone)
- chrischen 6y ago
  Well, I never opted into Amber Alerts so maybe it can still work by forcing people to use the Apple/Google built in contact tracing API.
  - DaniloDias 6y ago
    This kind of decision will trigger people like me to give up on iPhones. I’ve already given up on android due to google’s advertising horseshit.
reitzensteinm 6y ago
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, but the effectiveness of the app is equal to the square of the penetration. Both parties need the app. At 38% penetration only about 15% of contacts with a carrier will be warned. That is indeed not going to do much.
- this_user 6y ago
  You also have to consider the failure rate of the app. I don't know about the Icelandic implementation, but most approaches seem to be based on Bluetooth. There are all kinds of reasons why one might miss a signal sent by device nearby, including interference on the 2.4 GHz band with things like Wifi. Furthermore, the user has to actually report their infection, which probably not everyone is going to do. If we multiply all of those terms, the end result will be much lower than 15% even in this scenario. The tracing apps seem more like wishful thinking than something that is going to provide sufficiently broad and reliable coverage to have anything more than a marginal impact.
  - trfhuhg 6y ago
    The entire premise of the app is that P[transmission] = F(distance, duration). I think this is a naive assumption and just the two input parameters have nearly zero predictive power, i.e. the variance of the estimated probability would make any further analysis useless. I'd also argue that the only case where it would be useful is tracing a zombie-level virus when there's willingness to lock down with military a 5 sigma radius around the probable infection. Otherwise it's just a tool for marketing and spying.
tucosan 6y ago
Does anyone know more about the actual implementation of the app? Is it using Google/Apple Contact Tracing APIs already?
avsteele 6y ago
This paper * suggested, under some pessimistic assumptions, that it would require "near-universal app usage and near perfect compliance" This is due to the large fraction of spread from asymptomatic/presymptomatic carriers. My review of the paper is that their assumptions are overly optimistic and that contact tracing will be largely ineffective even at universal adoption. * https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6491/eabb6936/tab-pdf https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6491/eabb6936/tab... https://twitter.com/adamvsteele/status/1259661260406349824?s=20 https://twitter.com/adamvsteele/status/1259661260406349824?s...
g_p 6y ago
I think often the goals of contact tracing apps are misunderstood. The goal isn't to replace "name and phone number" human contact tracing, but rather to augment it. Iceland's location based approach seems to emphasise this, albeit at expense of privacy. Where contact tracing apps help is for contact events where people are in relative proximity for sustained periods of time. It seems that prolonged contact is a major factor in spreading the virus. If you're on a train with someone for half an hour, you'd not be able to identify them through regular contact tracing, and they wouldn't be able to be altered. On an aircraft this can usually be done as the airline cooperates with public health authorities to identify those sitting near a given individual on the plane etc. The impersonal but sustained contact situations are the ones apps can really help with, by raising the number of people able to be alerted to their risk of exposure. Traditional tracing handles people you know. App-based tracing, if it gets adopted, can help with the people you don't know but are sitting near, or otherwise around for a prolonged period.
blickentwapft 6y ago
The more successful the battle against coronavirus, the less effective such an app would appear.
crushthecurve 6y ago
Contact tracing (of the human-powered kind) is obviously hugely important in reducing the scale of outbreaks in the early stages. However digital contact tracing has a fatal flaw: Bluetooth cannot be used to reliably estimate proximity in dynamic, real-world scenarios as objects (especially human bodies) absorb huge amounts of the signal. In many scenarios this can make two people sitting next to each other look like they're 10-20 metres away compared to line-of-sight equivalents (just by having a phone in a pocket, handbag, or even next to a head taking a call). You can easily see this using, for instance, Apple's Bluetooth Explorer tool as part of Xcode developer tools [1] (or any of the bluetooth signal strength tools in the Play / App Stores). You don't have to rely on DIY tests from the internet though. While they're extremely static tests, the Singapore TraceTogether team did some field studies highlighting the significant variability across hardware [2]. Their tests ended in a plea for factory calibration data from hardware manufacturers. The Singapore team has talked about false positives in depth as a major issue (one was someone in a different apartment, because bluetooth goes through walls), which is why they set a hard, low RSSI value to reduce false positives - this means a lot of true positives will be missed too. The key Australian dev revealing significant issues in Australia's COVIDSafe app also acknowledged the major limitations of BLE. [3] The problem of course is you have a situation where you cannot determine if a contact is epidemiologically interesting, because accuracy in real-world situations is really down to the 20-30 metres of Bluetooth range, even over longer time-frames. This means you either have a huge caseload for human tracers to sort the signal from the noise (and this relies on the memory of all participants) or you have some kind of automated system (such as amber alerts that the NHS talks about) and the challenge there is that no-one knows if they're really interesting epidemiologically, as no-one can tell where each party was in the context. A recent series of talks by bluetooth experts is extremely informative. In one, an expert discusses all the significant sources of error which creates the huge variability you can see in DIY tests at home. [4] There are other great talks in that video, but Jen Watson - who leads a team at MIT engaged in advanced signal processing - delivers a good brief talk of the issues, hoping to use statistical analysis - using detection theory of fluctuating signals to estimate interesting contacts. [5] The takeaway from all this though is that it's a hard problem, and in Watson's talk she quickly moves on to thinking about additional future capabilities (such as features in upcoming Bluetooth standards) that might help improve the resolution. This does leave us with a large current problem though. Tracking apps have been thoroughly oversold with little evidence of usefulness, and in the case of the UK and Australia government authorities have refused to publish the algorithms they are using to determine proximity from an RSSI value and a phone model. There is nothing sensitive about this apart from the fact it may reveal the system is not useful for the stated purposes. [1] https://twitter.com/crushthecurve_/status/1259113614796939266 https://twitter.com/crushthecurve_/status/125911361479693926... [2] https://github.com/opentrace-community/opentrace-calibration/blob/master/Trial%20Methodologies.md https://github.com/opentrace-community/opentrace-calibration... [3] https://twitter.com/jim_mussared/status/1255498092239036417 https://twitter.com/jim_mussared/status/1255498092239036417 [4] https://youtu.be/KgKbllhgESc?t=2991 https://youtu.be/KgKbllhgESc?t=2991 [5] https://youtu.be/KgKbllhgESc?t=3175 https://youtu.be/KgKbllhgESc?t=3175
srmatto 6y ago
I thought ~60%+ must adopt for it to be effective? https://045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/ https://045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/
efitz 6y ago
Slightly offtopic, but it bothers me that the tech community has remained silent or supportive for contact tracing technology, when there were massive outcries for the past several years regarding other kinds of surveillance-enabling technology like face recognition. In general I would prefer that contact tracing technology not exist.
- visarga 6y ago
  Some countries had no lockdown instead using an app and testing. I'd say it's worth it, considering it works privately until someone is found to be infected.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  There are ways to implement contact tracing so that unnecessary information is not shared and so that you are in control of what gets shared and when. This is not the case for (say) face recognition on a CCTV feed.
  - smsm42 6y ago
    I'm sure there are ways. But can you ensure this specific app, recommended (or mandated) by your government, puts you in control and doesn't try to sneak a quick one past you? What would be the incentive for your government to ensure that instead of making the population much more observable and thus governable under the guise of taking care of your health? It's literally doing work against government interests, and the governments aren't usually very good at that. Same with major companies which just happen to be also major accumulators of stockpiles of tracking and surveillance information about you. Maybe this one they'd lay down their instincts and truly will roll out a perfectly privacy-preserving solution. But could you trust them to do that?
    - 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
      As an example, the one used in Singapore is open source and implements a public standard (bluetrace.io), so you don't even need to trust them, you can check it yourself. And before you ask, yes, people have decompiled the app to verify this.
temptemptemp111 6y ago
I didn't realize Icelandic people were this brainwashed.
seesawtron 6y ago
Maybe I am just ignorant but the article doesn't list a single reason as to why the automated tracing app hasn't helped much. There is a quote from a person who was involved in the tracing op but no comment from him/her either as to why it hasn't helped much. This is supposed to be a "technology review". Did the writer bother to ask "WHY NOT"? PS: Happy to stand corrected if someone else was able to read between the lines and find some reasons.
- kjaftaedi 6y ago
  The main reason is that we were able to control the spread of the virus faster than the need for the app. At the moment we're going several days at a time with zero new cases. It makes it a more difficult sell to the general public, when the overall feeling is that we've 'beaten' this. I get the feeling most of the general public aren't preparing for future outbreaks because, like most places, I think everyone wants to rely on the hope that the worst is over.
  - seesawtron 6y ago
    Assuming that your argument is correct that it's a little too late to see the benefits of tracing in Iceland, the article's negative connotation to use of the tracing app (or lack thereof) is misleading and discouraging for countries that are still struggling to contain the virus. I find the overall quality of online media, even tech blogs like this one that I used to love, seriously falling being caught up in the age of click bait news cycles.
justinclift 6y ago
https://archive.vn/g7Pp1 https://archive.vn/g7Pp1

157 points by jtbayly 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Iceland is quite unique, only one real large population center, limited public transport, tiny venues, multi-generational homes and overall a tiny population so it doesn’t seem to be the prime candidate for contact tracing apps since it’s effectively the best case scenario for traditional contact tracing.

__s 6y ago
For reference, https://icelandmag.is/article/capita-champion-world https://icelandmag.is/article/capita-champion-world Also most chess GMs per capita, 2nd most cars per capita, it goes on..
- Someone 6y ago
  That’s just the law of small countries (just made up that term). It’s easier for smaller entities to be an outlier. You’ll find about the same positive as negative ones, though. If you were to split a large country such as the USA or China into parts with a third of a million people, chances are that, for any of these, there would be a parts that beats Iceland. There may be exceptions such as the highest usage of hydro-power usage, as they have a rather unique geology. Vatican City won’t be beat on popes per km², either (it has just over two)
  - pedrocr 6y ago
    > Vatican City won’t be beat on popes per km², either (it has just over two) Just over 4 actually. There are 2 popes in 0.49 km^2 so 4.1.
    - Someone 6y ago
      Depends on your definition of pope. There’s only one bishop of Rome/head of the Catholic Church in Vatican City. Benedict XVI now is ‘pope emeritus’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_in_the_Catholic_Church#Pope_emeritus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_in_the_Catholic_Church#...)
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
    Remember the year Vatican city was the murder capital of the world by a large margin? It had 256 murders per 100,000 inhabitants [0]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/g77wwj/oc_the_homicide_rate_in_vatican_city/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/g77wwj/oc_...
  - kgwgk 6y ago
    > It’s easier for smaller entities to be an outlier. The Most Dangerous Equation Ignorance of how sample size affects statistical variation has created havoc for nearly a millennium https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/91c1/f00095ca156ea39fe0f225882977b8fa0167.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/91c1/f00095ca156ea39fe0f225...
dredds 6y ago
NZ is also postponing app tracing as our cases hit zero, and our PM recommends old school ppl power. (200 tracers on standby with more being trained just in case)
- Trasmatta 6y ago
  NZ and Iceland may be unique, but I am extremely skeptical about tracking apps being useful at all elsewhere, in comparison to large teams of trained contact tracers.
  - eloff 6y ago
    I'm skeptical of the idea with regard to civil liberties, but I don't see why one would doubt it's efficacy. It's a tool to make the contract tracers more productive, and I expect it will be fit for purpose.
    - exmadscientist 6y ago
      The biggest problem with contact tracing apps is that contact tracing in general is not very effective when the case rate is high. Its ideal use is to deal with the first case arriving in an isolated area. The sixth wave in the heart of NYC, not so useful. This means that the scalability advantages of tech don't synergize well with the uses of contact tracing. If you don't have very many cases to worry about, a dedicated team of humans will do just as well. And not have nearly the same long-term privacy issues.
      - Reelin 6y ago
        > a dedicated team of humans will do just as well That seems unlikely to me given that no jurisdiction has unlimited resources, not everything is captured on camera, patient's memories aren't perfect, and there may be incentives to lie or otherwise under-report certain contacts when things aren't completely anonymous. (For example, in many countries patients are likely to avoid revealing contact with a drug dealer.) In comparison, DP-3T (and also the joint Apple-Google framework based on an earlier revision of it) will capture any significant contact provided that both parties are carrying appropriate devices. It also maintains anonymity, so it removes nearly all incentives to mis- or under- report. It's not a replacement for teams of people, but it should provide significant improvements in areas where the majority of people are carrying such devices. > And not have nearly the same long-term privacy issues. Neither DP-3T, the Apple-Google framework, or the TCN protocol have any significant privacy implications (beyond whatever is already associated with carrying the physical device doing the tracing, and to the best of my knowledge of course).
triyambakam 6y ago
Contact tracing is not needed - identify the people at high risk and protect them from the virus. People at low risk should be expected to circulate the virus and develop immunity. Contract tracing among low risk defeats the purpose. If we're ever going to get our lives back, and not be on indefinite timeline of "maybe there will be a highly effective vaccine" we actually need the virus to circulate among people who can safely get it, get over it, make antibodies which historically - before the advent of highly effective vaccines - is how pandemics ended. Total isolation policies prevent broad population immunity. We know from decades of medical science that the population develops immunity while acquiring antibodies.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  That depends on the disease. Is there any proof that people develop immunity to covid 19 after getting it?
  - bad_user 6y ago
    We don't have evidence due to disease being so new, but there's enough reason to suspect we'll develop at least short term neutralizing immunity. But yes, caution is necessary. We don't have enough evidence to push forward a national strategy that's based on people developing immunity without a vaccine. Here's WHO's statement on this matter: https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-passports-in-the-context-of-covid-19 https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-p... "Herd immunity" without a vaccine, as a strategy, is equivalent with doing nothing and let the virus wreak havoc on the population.
    - tomp 6y ago
      Risk vs reward. If there is immunity, then developing herd immunity sooner rather than later is important (even more so if there's immunity but it's only short-term). If there's no immunity, we're, excuse the expression, fucked anyhow. Can vaccines even be developed if there's no natural immunity?
dehrmann 6y ago
All the interesting places people have been pointing to are islands. Except South Korea, but it's effectively an island.
- adventured 6y ago
  Also one of the primary reasons Hawaii only has 17 deaths and 637 positives.
- manquer 6y ago
  South Korea is this context similar to an island . While it is peninsula the only land border is with North Korea and highly guarded , effectively you can only enter by flying in just like an island.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Not just flying. South Korea is also connected to Russia, China and Japan by ferry.
    - wigl 6y ago
      Not sure about the Russia and China routes but the Busan-Shimonoseki ferry is pretty impractical. 13 hrs and about as expensive as a flight. More if you consider train costs from Shimonoseki.
      - 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
        Busan-Fukuoka ferries go directly between two huge cities and are priced competitively, particularly if you get a cabin instead of paying for a hotel.
        wigl 6y ago
        Wow the JR Beetle is super fast! Didn't know about that, my knowledge is pretty old, thanks!
CathedralBorrow 6y ago
> multi-generational homes Can you clarify what you mean by this?
- llarsson 6y ago
  That typically means grandma lives with your family in her old age, rather then by herself or in some old folks home.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    This isn’t typical at least in my decade of living in Iceland.
  - CathedralBorrow 6y ago
    Ah, thanks. Iceland is whatever you call the opposite of that. Grandma very rarely lives with her family, she lives by herself -- hopefully with her partner -- until she is unable to and then moves into a system that ranges from living-alone-with-help to typical old folks homes, and will gradually move towards more care as her health allows. So that's wrong in the original comment, but the rest seemed pretty spot on to me, and doesn't change the argument much I think.
    - gramakri 6y ago
      The opposite is nuclear family I think
ashtonkem 6y ago
Iceland is so unique that the primary dating app considers incest as a risk factor. That’s not a thing most population groups need to worry about.
- kleton 6y ago
  That was more of a joke app that the foreign press got very excited about.
swebs 6y ago
And the population of the entire country is 360,000 people.
rurban 6y ago
I would doubt that. If I remember the Iceland outbreak map correctly, they had two isolated outbreak centers, far away from each other. One in Reykjavik center and the 2nd in a small town outside. I would definitely like to know if my village is suddenly affected or not. They already did the very first traditional contact tracing, worldwide. We know a lot from this data. And they also did tracing via the mutating generations. Full scale.

user_50123890 6y ago

This reassures the hypothesis that you probably won't catch the virus from a brief contact in a grocery store or similar if you keep your distance. Infections happen within families, and spread from one family to another by friends/coworkers. The infected people should be easily able to list all exposed out by name. An exception is of course mass indoors public events that are forbidden now. This is where a contact tracing app would probably prove to be the most useful.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Retric 6y ago
Incidental contact is unlikely to matter in most cases. However, multiple people at different tables where infected at a restaurant from a single customer. So, it doesn’t take that much.
- eloff 6y ago
  Or on public transport. New York's subway system was probably it's Achilles heel during this outbreak.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    Except Staten Island had the second most cases per capita. Lots of the obvious NYC theories have holes where you look at places affected.
    - jmull 6y ago
      People who live or work on Staten Island used mta services, including subways, heavily.
    - adrianmonk 6y ago
      Maybe ferries cause the same kinds of problems as subways do.

barbegal 6y ago

This app tracks users’locations using GPS data and according to the article "allows investigators—with permission—to look at whether those with a positive diagnosis are potentially spreading the disease" Without also being able to know the location of people without a positive diagnosis, the app probably doesn't help that much. But I don't think this necessarily applies to apps being developed for other countries where Bluetooth is being used to measure person to person contact directly. This article lacks any real insight into what isn't working or why.

jonastryggvi 6y ago
I've heard that the app was useful to refresh people's memory when doing contact tracing, but as the cases went down quickly after the app was released then it might not have been a gamechanger. the app is open source of people are interested; https://github.com/aranja/rakning-c19-app https://github.com/aranja/rakning-c19-app
Kephael 6y ago
Couldn't you DDoS this infrastructure by having beacons masquerade as users and then have people quarantined because they were marked as near an infected individual when in reality they were near a rogue beacon that spams generated identifiers? This certainly can't be constitutional in any Western system of government. Even if the identifiers were encrypted with a public key that only the tracer service had the private key to, couldn't a bad actor register as a bunch of actual people and then have them show as coming in contact with infected people?
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Or DDoS society.
- jmull 6y ago
  No. All this app does is record a user’s location for the last two weeks. Then, after a positive diagnosis, that location data is examined as an aid to help determine who that person may have come into contact with. Beacons, identifiers, constitutions, and public keys don’t come into it.

jonastryggvi 6y ago

here is the covid19 info website in iceland, if anyone is interested in how many tests have been done and other statistics; https://www.covid.is/data https://www.covid.is/data

krzyk 6y ago
Wow, it looks like Iceland recovered from it pretty fast. Only 6 active cases
- dredds 6y ago
  The next issue is whether to count positives who are new arrivals placed into quarantine of 2 or more weeks. Countries will be reluctant to blemish their clean virus-free records even though quarantine may be effective and necessary to have limited allowable travel. Seems we should only count people who test positive after passing through quarantine if they were first cleared as negative and released.

duxup 6y ago

I wonder how much it would. There's a chance that a chance encounter would result in an infection. But then how many data points of low probability events are useful?

pizza 6y ago

Something I've been thinking about during lockdown is that, while we are for the most part staying at home when possible, if you get sick, you only have, maybe, 4 or 5 contacts to trace, on average. If we release lockdown, the number of average contacts to trace goes way way up.

w3mmpp 6y ago
If you lock people up in solitary confinement they won't catch it at all. See the problem with your logic here?
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  If we did just that for three weeks all of this would be over.
  - w3mmpp 6y ago
    Today for the coronavirus, tomorrow for what else?
    - z3rgl1ng 6y ago
      The coronavirus. Weren’t you paying attention? They said three weeks.
    - trickstra 6y ago
      Would be nice if we printed some trillions to eradicate smoking. It would still save more lives than corona claimed - 8 million in 2017 https://ourworldindata.org/smoking#smoking-is-one-of-the-leading-risks-for-early-death https://ourworldindata.org/smoking#smoking-is-one-of-the-lea...
  - defnotashton2 6y ago
    Noooo, it wouldn't be that simple. If it would be, we would all be able to eradicate several viruses..
- 6y ago

cwhiz 6y ago

Only 33% of Americans would consider using a contract tracing app. https://www.axios.com/axios-ipsos-coronavirus-week-9-contact-tracing-bd747eaa-8fa1-4822-89bc-4e214c44a44d.html https://www.axios.com/axios-ipsos-coronavirus-week-9-contact...

raggi 6y ago
Sure, but equivalent tracing teams in some of the bad us cities would have two to three orders of magnitude higher case load per team member. The "traditional methods" like making phone calls as described in the article do not work at that scale. Yes testing and many other things are more effective, and tracing is less useful if you've effectively got rates down to manageable levels, but at unmanaged levels, automation _could_ really help. New York has more new cases per day than Iceland has handled in total.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  It doesn’t matter. People don’t trust the apps and won’t use them. Singpore has 20% and Iceland now 40%.
phyzome 6y ago
It would definitely depend on the app, for me! There are better and worse ways of doing this, along both privacy and security axes. (...if I even used a smartphone)
chrischen 6y ago
Well, I never opted into Amber Alerts so maybe it can still work by forcing people to use the Apple/Google built in contact tracing API.
- DaniloDias 6y ago
  This kind of decision will trigger people like me to give up on iPhones. I’ve already given up on android due to google’s advertising horseshit.

reitzensteinm 6y ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, but the effectiveness of the app is equal to the square of the penetration. Both parties need the app. At 38% penetration only about 15% of contacts with a carrier will be warned. That is indeed not going to do much.

this_user 6y ago
You also have to consider the failure rate of the app. I don't know about the Icelandic implementation, but most approaches seem to be based on Bluetooth. There are all kinds of reasons why one might miss a signal sent by device nearby, including interference on the 2.4 GHz band with things like Wifi. Furthermore, the user has to actually report their infection, which probably not everyone is going to do. If we multiply all of those terms, the end result will be much lower than 15% even in this scenario. The tracing apps seem more like wishful thinking than something that is going to provide sufficiently broad and reliable coverage to have anything more than a marginal impact.
- trfhuhg 6y ago
  The entire premise of the app is that P[transmission] = F(distance, duration). I think this is a naive assumption and just the two input parameters have nearly zero predictive power, i.e. the variance of the estimated probability would make any further analysis useless. I'd also argue that the only case where it would be useful is tracing a zombie-level virus when there's willingness to lock down with military a 5 sigma radius around the probable infection. Otherwise it's just a tool for marketing and spying.

tucosan 6y ago

Does anyone know more about the actual implementation of the app? Is it using Google/Apple Contact Tracing APIs already?

avsteele 6y ago

This paper * suggested, under some pessimistic assumptions, that it would require "near-universal app usage and near perfect compliance" This is due to the large fraction of spread from asymptomatic/presymptomatic carriers. My review of the paper is that their assumptions are overly optimistic and that contact tracing will be largely ineffective even at universal adoption. * https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6491/eabb6936/tab-pdf https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6491/eabb6936/tab... https://twitter.com/adamvsteele/status/1259661260406349824?s=20 https://twitter.com/adamvsteele/status/1259661260406349824?s...

g_p 6y ago

I think often the goals of contact tracing apps are misunderstood. The goal isn't to replace "name and phone number" human contact tracing, but rather to augment it. Iceland's location based approach seems to emphasise this, albeit at expense of privacy. Where contact tracing apps help is for contact events where people are in relative proximity for sustained periods of time. It seems that prolonged contact is a major factor in spreading the virus. If you're on a train with someone for half an hour, you'd not be able to identify them through regular contact tracing, and they wouldn't be able to be altered. On an aircraft this can usually be done as the airline cooperates with public health authorities to identify those sitting near a given individual on the plane etc. The impersonal but sustained contact situations are the ones apps can really help with, by raising the number of people able to be alerted to their risk of exposure. Traditional tracing handles people you know. App-based tracing, if it gets adopted, can help with the people you don't know but are sitting near, or otherwise around for a prolonged period.

blickentwapft 6y ago

The more successful the battle against coronavirus, the less effective such an app would appear.

crushthecurve 6y ago

Contact tracing (of the human-powered kind) is obviously hugely important in reducing the scale of outbreaks in the early stages. However digital contact tracing has a fatal flaw: Bluetooth cannot be used to reliably estimate proximity in dynamic, real-world scenarios as objects (especially human bodies) absorb huge amounts of the signal. In many scenarios this can make two people sitting next to each other look like they're 10-20 metres away compared to line-of-sight equivalents (just by having a phone in a pocket, handbag, or even next to a head taking a call). You can easily see this using, for instance, Apple's Bluetooth Explorer tool as part of Xcode developer tools [1] (or any of the bluetooth signal strength tools in the Play / App Stores). You don't have to rely on DIY tests from the internet though. While they're extremely static tests, the Singapore TraceTogether team did some field studies highlighting the significant variability across hardware [2]. Their tests ended in a plea for factory calibration data from hardware manufacturers. The Singapore team has talked about false positives in depth as a major issue (one was someone in a different apartment, because bluetooth goes through walls), which is why they set a hard, low RSSI value to reduce false positives - this means a lot of true positives will be missed too. The key Australian dev revealing significant issues in Australia's COVIDSafe app also acknowledged the major limitations of BLE. [3] The problem of course is you have a situation where you cannot determine if a contact is epidemiologically interesting, because accuracy in real-world situations is really down to the 20-30 metres of Bluetooth range, even over longer time-frames. This means you either have a huge caseload for human tracers to sort the signal from the noise (and this relies on the memory of all participants) or you have some kind of automated system (such as amber alerts that the NHS talks about) and the challenge there is that no-one knows if they're really interesting epidemiologically, as no-one can tell where each party was in the context. A recent series of talks by bluetooth experts is extremely informative. In one, an expert discusses all the significant sources of error which creates the huge variability you can see in DIY tests at home. [4] There are other great talks in that video, but Jen Watson - who leads a team at MIT engaged in advanced signal processing - delivers a good brief talk of the issues, hoping to use statistical analysis - using detection theory of fluctuating signals to estimate interesting contacts. [5] The takeaway from all this though is that it's a hard problem, and in Watson's talk she quickly moves on to thinking about additional future capabilities (such as features in upcoming Bluetooth standards) that might help improve the resolution. This does leave us with a large current problem though. Tracking apps have been thoroughly oversold with little evidence of usefulness, and in the case of the UK and Australia government authorities have refused to publish the algorithms they are using to determine proximity from an RSSI value and a phone model. There is nothing sensitive about this apart from the fact it may reveal the system is not useful for the stated purposes. [1] https://twitter.com/crushthecurve_/status/1259113614796939266 https://twitter.com/crushthecurve_/status/125911361479693926... [2] https://github.com/opentrace-community/opentrace-calibration/blob/master/Trial%20Methodologies.md https://github.com/opentrace-community/opentrace-calibration... [3] https://twitter.com/jim_mussared/status/1255498092239036417 https://twitter.com/jim_mussared/status/1255498092239036417 [4] https://youtu.be/KgKbllhgESc?t=2991 https://youtu.be/KgKbllhgESc?t=2991 [5] https://youtu.be/KgKbllhgESc?t=3175 https://youtu.be/KgKbllhgESc?t=3175

srmatto 6y ago

I thought ~60%+ must adopt for it to be effective? https://045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/ https://045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/

efitz 6y ago

Slightly offtopic, but it bothers me that the tech community has remained silent or supportive for contact tracing technology, when there were massive outcries for the past several years regarding other kinds of surveillance-enabling technology like face recognition. In general I would prefer that contact tracing technology not exist.

visarga 6y ago
Some countries had no lockdown instead using an app and testing. I'd say it's worth it, considering it works privately until someone is found to be infected.
9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
There are ways to implement contact tracing so that unnecessary information is not shared and so that you are in control of what gets shared and when. This is not the case for (say) face recognition on a CCTV feed.
- smsm42 6y ago
  I'm sure there are ways. But can you ensure this specific app, recommended (or mandated) by your government, puts you in control and doesn't try to sneak a quick one past you? What would be the incentive for your government to ensure that instead of making the population much more observable and thus governable under the guise of taking care of your health? It's literally doing work against government interests, and the governments aren't usually very good at that. Same with major companies which just happen to be also major accumulators of stockpiles of tracking and surveillance information about you. Maybe this one they'd lay down their instincts and truly will roll out a perfectly privacy-preserving solution. But could you trust them to do that?
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
    As an example, the one used in Singapore is open source and implements a public standard (bluetrace.io), so you don't even need to trust them, you can check it yourself. And before you ask, yes, people have decompiled the app to verify this.

temptemptemp111 6y ago

I didn't realize Icelandic people were this brainwashed.

seesawtron 6y ago

Maybe I am just ignorant but the article doesn't list a single reason as to why the automated tracing app hasn't helped much. There is a quote from a person who was involved in the tracing op but no comment from him/her either as to why it hasn't helped much. This is supposed to be a "technology review". Did the writer bother to ask "WHY NOT"? PS: Happy to stand corrected if someone else was able to read between the lines and find some reasons.

kjaftaedi 6y ago
The main reason is that we were able to control the spread of the virus faster than the need for the app. At the moment we're going several days at a time with zero new cases. It makes it a more difficult sell to the general public, when the overall feeling is that we've 'beaten' this. I get the feeling most of the general public aren't preparing for future outbreaks because, like most places, I think everyone wants to rely on the hope that the worst is over.
- seesawtron 6y ago
  Assuming that your argument is correct that it's a little too late to see the benefits of tracing in Iceland, the article's negative connotation to use of the tracing app (or lack thereof) is misleading and discouraging for countries that are still struggling to contain the virus. I find the overall quality of online media, even tech blogs like this one that I used to love, seriously falling being caught up in the age of click bait news cycles.

justinclift 6y ago

https://archive.vn/g7Pp1 https://archive.vn/g7Pp1