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COVIDSafe: Australia’s digital contact tracing failure

74 points by ghuntley 5y ago

pauloberstein 5y ago
For anyone not from Australia, there is more to the story than "police officers assaulting unarmed civilians" just because they were not following covid regulations. That being said, the footage where that was taken was in response to, I agree, a series of non-optimally handled situations.
- throwawaythekey 5y ago
  It's closer to "police officers assaulting protesting civilians who refused to stop protesting"
Gatsky 5y ago
Great article. The hot take at the beginning on the end of liberal democracy is a bit silly. Anyone in Melbourne can tell you that the protestors are almost all just looking for a fight with the police while in various states of intoxication. The protests started the day after the path out of lockdown was announced. It started with a tantrum from the construction industry about being shutdown (they’ve been allowed to work all this time), but was then taken over by young men wanting to smash stuff and have a dust up with riot police. It is about as far from BLM as you can imagine.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  > The hot take at the beginning on the end of liberal democracy is a bit silly. I found the article difficult to follow because of that. Is it a political statement? A frustrated rant by a concerned parent? A technical article? I read the whole article, but am unclear without going through its references, which I haven't done. This is where an editor, even just a detached friend, would help. Author seems to be saying they have effective telemetric contact tracing apps in Europe? Is he saying the Australian app is based on the European model but has unfixed bugs, or is he saying the Australian app uses a flawed model?
  - ImaCake 5y ago
    I agree this needs an editor. It is hard to follow. I can forgive anyone in Australia for being frustrated right now. We have done really well against COVID but the two largest states are in lockdown until vaccination rates get high enough. People need someone of something to blame. Somewhere they can release their rage. Hopefully we will be past all this by christmas.
- angelzen 5y ago
  The casualness. Construction industry was allowed to work. Turns out the right to work is predicated on the state of the ultimate gauge of human worth, covid-cases-per-million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_work
  - tomrod 5y ago
    The "allowance" to work started long before COVID-19. Zoning, licensing, etc.
- cavisne 5y ago
  Yeah no young men looking to smash stuff and fight police in BLM https://fukkot.com/riots/all/ https://fukkot.com/riots/all/
  - nsonha 5y ago
    this is not a BLM discussion so idk why you posted those video here
- solzh 5y ago
  This is blatant misinformation. Melbourne has been the most locked down city in the world. Understandably, the working class for whom WFH is not an option, have had enough. The protests are predominantly second/third generation Mediterranean immigrants, women, and children. As Scandinavia rolls back all restrictions, Australian media work in concert with the government to stifle any dissent as the country spirals deeper into totalitarianism. Citizens are unable to leave the country, a violation of the UN declaration of Human Rights. This is what fascism looks like: https://twitter.com/RitaPanahi/status/1441323043687518221 https://twitter.com/RitaPanahi/status/1441323043687518221 https://twitter.com/beingrealmac/status/1441687633911074816 https://twitter.com/beingrealmac/status/1441687633911074816 https://twitter.com/K_for_rats/status/1441380783676030983 https://twitter.com/K_for_rats/status/1441380783676030983
  - ImaCake 5y ago
    For those not from Australia; we are not about to become a fascist state. The parent comment’s other complaints about inequality are indeed true and our government has failed them. Lockdown sucks and is problematic. There are riots and the media is of course following the government line. But these lockdowns will end and some level of normalcy restored.
  - Gatsky 5y ago
    I live in Melbourne. Trust me, I’m not misinformed. You can leave the country by the way (I’ve done it), what is your source?
    - solzh 5y ago
      > If you are an Australian citizen or a permanent resident you cannot leave Australia due to COVID-19 restrictions unless you have an exemption. https://covid19.homeaffairs.gov.au/leaving-australia https://covid19.homeaffairs.gov.au/leaving-australia
      - Gatsky 5y ago
        There is a list of reasonable exemptions including work related travel.
llampx 5y ago
Australia is the example we should all strive to emulate in matters of national health, citizen rights and privacy regulation, as well as a forward-thinking climate policy. ... Not.
- axolttl88 5y ago
  Australia has a generally highly-regarded and affordable health care system (public and private).
  - travoc 5y ago
    The part where they lock you in your house to keep you from getting sick was the crowning achievement.
    - pageandrew 5y ago
      My favorite part is when they deploy a massive police force to beat you up if you dare protest being locked in your house
      - 0xy 5y ago
        Not only that, but Victoria Police actually visit you at home if you're "planning to protest". That's right, thoughtcrimes will get you a visit from the same department which pepper sprayed a 70 year old woman after throwing her to the ground.
  - nostrebored 5y ago
    Australian healthcare has left me unnecessarily hospitalized, waiting for care, and generally unsatisfied. Do not recommend
    - ostenning 5y ago
      I think that most western countries have healthcare systems on the brink of collapse and Australia is no exception unfortunately
blitzar 5y ago
The UK version is doing all these things correctly (by the authors definition), and its digital contact tracing is a total failure.
- mnd999 5y ago
  The UK gave up. I’m not sure why we’re even bothering keeping the contact tracing going. It’s impossible to track and trace when you have 30,000+ cases a day. The policy now is vaccines and (hopefully) mild symptoms.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Contact tracing was doomed from the start. Once widespread community transmission got moving it was simply impossible to trace so many people.
    - blitzar 5y ago
      Either movement has to be low (i.e. full lockdowns) or cases have to be low. If 'the start' is early enough, I expect the impact could be material (as per for example Australia) once the spread picks up steam, however, it is just a £40bn vanity project.
smoldesu 5y ago
I wish I could read your van article, but it says that I'm not "subscribed". What exactly does that mean in the context of a blog? Is there some 'Pricing' page that I glossed over by accident?
- ghuntley 5y ago
  I'll open it up. All content is free but older content is for newsletter subscribers only. See www.ghuntley.com/newsletter
top_post 5y ago
The thing about Australia is we love to walk eyes wide open into failure. We watch policies being implemented in other countries with real world data to learn from, and will then just unabashedly ignore it and do it all ourselves to achieve the exact same outcomes. This is across technology, politics, climate, business, the works. It's ingrained culturally and will never change.
- solzh 5y ago
  > Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    Australia doesn't have to be competent, it can just dig up its vast mineral wealth, share the riches among its very small population, and think that skill and competence had something to do with it. By comparison, I'm amazed at places like South Korea, Japan and Israel that get by on sheer innovation and technology.
    - nsonha 5y ago
      a very unfair characterization of Australia, we also invest heavily in institutional education, as an export, wine producing, tourism and other pretentious things like that. You see innovation is about profit margin, technology is for China and that kind of countries.
    - mmerlin 5y ago
      The "small population" who benefit most are the corrupted politicians and mining magnates. and their hangers-on. Average Australians (including heavy manufacturers) often pay approximately double for our own gas, than Japan and China do, even when liquefaction and transport are included. Victoria is looking to build a gas import terminal to re-purchase Australian gas via a 3rd party country, and this will actually save money, because the system is that bad and Liberal govt refuses to activate the "gas reservation" law they passed in parliament (but never called into action) as a warning to the gas cartel to slightly reduce the price gouging. As another example, Qatar exports less volume of gas than Australia but their country earns 2000% more royalties that Australia because of our self-interest-first political class playing the "game of mates" for cushy jobs (board of directors etc) for these traitors post-politics. Norway is a much better example of how to do things with less corruption than Australia. They created a sovereign wealth fund that has saved well over $100 Billion. Australia in contrast voted in Tony Abbott whose platform consisted of "ax the mining tax" and like sheep people voted for it to save money for the magnates and collect even less resource taxes for the benefit of all. Australia does have a "future fund" of saved cash but that is ONLY for politician's financial benefit, not the population in general.
dustinmoris 5y ago
Does Australia still think that lockdowns do actually anything good? Lolz My condolences to all victims of lockdown.
- robbiep 5y ago
  They’re regrettable, they’re economically disruptive, and they must end, but absolutely - they save lives and we’re in the midst of a pandemic. No-one here wants to see the level of death and misery that has been visited on other countries that have been unable to get their case numbers under control.
- shirro 5y ago
  No, everyone, everywhere thinks lockdowns suck. They have them because they thought it was better than the alternative. Not sure if it has though because they have gone on so long. The other states have done everything they can to keep kids in schools, businesses open and people getting incomes. We had 10 days total lockdown in my state since this started which I think were probably 10 more than we needed but they went on the information we had at the time. I have complete freedom of movement within my state and with most other states. See lots of active construction and people working and I can go to the shops, restaurants, bars and sporting events though they have some restrictions on density. Condolences to the families of people who have died from covid everywhere. Can't blame people for doing whatever they could to protect their local community but happy most of Australia avoided both covid and the hardships that went with fighting it. We were very fortunate.
  - dustinmoris 5y ago
    The people who are meant to die from COVID will die when you open up again. By the way death is part of life as much as is birth. Without death we couldn’t live. We should be happy about people dying by natural causes rather than by guns or war. If anything, the more people die by a natural cause like COVID the better for the world, because imagine how much carbon we set off by every person less eating beef, driving a car or flying a plane. Lockdowns are the most ridiculous and inefficient stupid thing.
nsonha 5y ago
> If you think these lockdowns are not a concern, I'm going to flat out say it here - you are sitting in an immense position of privilege I'd even say if you work from home then you should not have an opinion about lockdown. Because it's more about protecting other people and it's neither you who has to make any kind of decision, or trade-off because of lockdown.
tim-- 5y ago
One of the biggest failures of COVIDSafe in Australia was that it was so heavily bashed by everyone on it's initial release. Anyone who was anyone binned it as soon as it was released. With an app like COVIDSafe, where you require to have mass adoption of the app to work (there is no use having 10% of phones operating in the wild with the app installed, you require more like 80-90%, ideally every phone running the app.) Instead, every techie I spoke to either hated it wasn't open source; or used the fact that the app was based on Singapore's app, but was not subsequently open sourced itself. I feel that if the powers that be had changed the way that the source was developed, worked with the public a little closer that maybe these issues would not have existed. But sadly, the damage for COVIDSafe was already done in the first few weeks. There was no resuscitation possible. I liken it to how the AstraZeneca vaccine was dissed in the media. A small chance of clots was heralded as a major issue, which lead to a extremely slow uptake of a vaccine that is for the most part perfectly fine. Add to that the fact that privacy was never really enacted for the use of the data gathered by COVIDSafe (and other similar contact tracing tools, for example in Sydney, NSW https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/breach-of-trust-police-using-qr-check-in-data-to-solve-crimes-20210903-p58om8.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/breach-of-trust-poli... ) and you have a perfect storm of an app that no-one really keeps installed. COVIDSafe was dead on arrival.
- afgdfgaefdg 5y ago
  >I liken it to how the AstraZeneca vaccine was dissed in the media. u shouldnt there was a short point before delta in the uk where (healthy) young people were more at risk from clotting of AZ than contracting rona this sort of revisionism isnt healthy
- alerighi 5y ago
  > I liken it to how the AstraZeneca vaccine was dissed in the media. A small chance of clots was heralded as a major issue, which lead to a extremely slow uptake of a vaccine that is for the most part perfectly fine. It's less safe, there were some deaths, and also it protects less than alternatives like Pfizer and Moderna. So there is no point in that vaccine, in my country they first banned it for people under 60, and now they are no longer using it, choosing only to use Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (that uses the better mRNA technology).
jeeeb 5y ago
The COVIDSafe app was a failure and waste of tax payer money. Everyone knows it. The federal government has spent the last year and a half trying to change the narrative, mostly unsuccessfully. State governments developed their own QR code based systems which seem to work.. up to a limit. Those systems worked to stop multiple outbreaks - e.g. NSW contract traced their way out of several outbreaks without significant restrictions. The question I felt was unanswered by the article is have overseas apps actually delivered significantly better results than that? The actual big difference between Australia and most other developed nations seems to be that we are behind on our vaccine rollout and more willing/able to restrict individual movement, especially across state borders. Our vaccine rollout should catch up over the next month or so. NSW is approaching 90% first doses for over 16’s. VIC is approaching 80%. The dose spacing for AZ is particularly long, and at least VIC is using 6 week spacing for Pfizer so Australia tends to lag more on 2nd dose figures but that gap will close over the coming month. On a side note, all the information the author wishes was in the COVIDSafe app is also readily available on state government websites - e.g. coronavirus.vic.gov.au. Personally I prefer having this information on a website than in an app.
- ghuntley 5y ago
  > The question I felt was unanswered by the article is have overseas apps actually delivered significantly better results than that? 1. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AusOpenTech/COVIDSafe-Report/main/Report%20on%20the%20operation%20and%20effectiveness%20of%20the%20COVIDSafe%20application.pdf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AusOpenTech/COVIDSafe-Repo... 2. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.04.21257951v4 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.04.21257951v...
  - jeeeb 5y ago
    My question was have contract tracing apps overseas performed significantly better than the QR based systems used in Australia (instead of COVIDSafe). Neither of these links seem to show that. The first is a criticism of COVIDSafe. I agree it was crap, but have Bluetooth based contract tracing actually worked well to prevent outbreaks anywhere? Is it actually better than QR code based systems? The second paper you link at least attempts to model this but it’s just that, conclusions drawn from a simulation. In practice there have been many more cases and deaths in Washington State alone than all of Australia, and that’s without adjusting for the much larger population in Australia.
nsonha 5y ago
> Instead of putting the information that people need on peoples phones in the COVIDSafe application everyone in Australia has had to tune into regularly scheduled TV broadcasts I thought it was just me who finds this incredibly stupid. This shows how weak the media in our country is. Instead of focusing on news-worthy events, it acts like government's bitch and just gives them air time for a daily conference whose sole purpose is reading out empty numbers. A lot of people say Dan Andrews (Victoria's Premier) worked very hard. Based on what? The fact that he shows up on TV everyday reading statistics out loud? A busy man would not do that.
alerighi 5y ago
Digital contact tracing was a failure in practically every country, and there is a techincal problem: all these apps uses Bluetooth to measure the distance, since GPS impacts privacy too much, and also battery life on the device, and doesn't work well in closed spaces. But you cannot have enought resolution with bluetooth to distinguish between 1 meter and 2 meters (the distance that is considered safe), you can have precision in tens of meters. Also you get a ton of false positives, for example caused by people that passes nearby buy you don't came in contact with (e.g. people in the car near you when you are stopped in the traffic). Finally the idea that people wants to collaborate is pure utopia, yes there are people that wants, but the majority of people don't want to install an app that if they possibly came in contact with one people that have the virus (something that if we all install the app was certain, at least in the last winter) will force you to isolate for 14 days, that includes not going to work without getting money for sickness since you are techincailly not ill. Basically it's a failure the whole concept of digital contact tracing, not the implementations.
- AdrianB1 5y ago
  In Australia there were more problems, see some other comments providing the details.
- nradov 5y ago
  There is no reliable scientific evidence that 2m is "safe". It's an arbitrary number. The WHO recommends 1m. It's really more a matter of airflow than distance. https://www.who.int/westernpacific/emergencies/covid-19/information/physical-distancing https://www.who.int/westernpacific/emergencies/covid-19/info...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
Can we get Mike Cannon Brookes in the comments again telling us to trust the government on COVIDSafe while forgetting to say Atlassian were helping develop COVIDSafe
- 0xy 5y ago
  That explains why the app is hot garbage. The creators of JIRA were behind it.
LawnGnome 5y ago
> Australia right now is in a continued state of lockdown _Some_ of Australia is in a state of lockdown. This includes Sydney and Melbourne, Australia's two largest cities, but the majority of states are currently not in lockdown. Don't get me wrong: the response to the pandemic from Australia's federal government has been dreadful, and I'm not a huge fan of the police-oriented approach some states have used when they've been locked down either. But I think the first few paragraphs are alarmist and exaggerated, and that discredits the excellent discussion of the technical failures later in the article.
- ghuntley 5y ago
  Thanks for being my editor. Tweaked!
  - fragmede 5y ago
    It still takes a bit of scrolling to get past the unreadable alarmism, fyi.
    - ghuntley 5y ago
      If anything is not factual then https://ghuntley.com/contact https://ghuntley.com/contact and I'll make adjustments. These lockdowns have been savage have caused immense social and financial damage to our society. You would feel similar if you were in my shoes.
      - anotherevan 5y ago
        I am in your shoes, and while I agree that the lock-downs have been damaging, I (and I think a good percentage of Australians) believe that not locking down would have been a lot worse. It was probably the best of the range of bad choices available.
        exodust 5y ago
        Just because people agreed with initial "2 week snap lockdowns", doesn't mean they still agree with never-ending lockdowns, curfews and closed borders (even for vaxxed / negative test people). Many people have family interstate. There is no end in sight to lockdowns because the measures they use are case-based, not vaccination, despite what we're being told. The states with zero cases don't want to accept the endemic reality of Covid. They are enjoying their Oasis too much.
account15151315 5y ago
I saw some amazing analysis from some of the folks in the group Geoff mentions. It was calm, objective and measured, and didn't attempt to draw conclusions that couldn't be backed by observable fact. Disappointingly, there was also a class of analysis (coming from a smaller part of the group) that was based conjecture or guesswork that fuelled a narrative of COVIDSafe that was wrong or inaccurate. I saw this bring out both the best side of the tech community (methodical, analytical, evidence-based, objective) and the worst (conspiracy-driven, inflammatory, chaotic) that was dejecting. I felt the former was committed to making conclusions from observations, whereas the latter made observations to fit the conclusions they wanted to reach. Doing so in the public domain alongside legitimate analysis simply gave credibility to unfounded and baseless conclusions. Geoff's analysis says: >These problems would not have existed had Australia chosen the Exposure Notification Framework (GAEN) path. however this would never have helped out contact tracing, which he says is his motivation: >Medical professionals (contact tracers) deserve technical tools that work. Forcing them (via political pressure) to use ineffective tools robs them of precious time which could be better spent contact tracing. This is disingenous and trivialises the situation. One of the value propositions behind the BlueTrace stack was to provide greater visibility to contact tracers, by giving them access to the data in cases of close contacts. The app development was in full swing well before Apple & Google had established their notification protocol. Using BlueTrace was a smart move at the time, as it leveraged a model that had already been rolled out to Singapore. Of course, there were/are obvious challenges with this model (e.g. the unreliability of iOS) - but at the time, there was a true need to get something out, and to their credit this was turned around exceptionally fast in the absence of anything else. Chucking it out and starting again simply because GAEN was released would have been a misfire, particularly where it could have been accommodated by a future release. The shift away from BlueTrace to something like GAEN would have represented a significant shift away from the fundamental promise of the system - that contact tracers get access to the contact data. Whether you agree with that decision or not, that was COVIDSafe's policy objective. There are/were many legitimate issues with COVIDSafe that made the product (in my opinion) non-viable: the combination of the definition of a close contact was "1.5m + 15 min exposure time" with the means of recording encounters made using it all the time nonsensical, but also seems inconsistent with how we know COVID spreads (well, especially the delta strain). Many fleeting or substantial encounters would be completely missed, because they didn't satisfy that requirement, even though we would be legitimately concerned about them now. Add to that fact that deriving distance from BT strength is something that's challenging to do right and is only so accurate if done perfectly. But harder than that - recording "15 mins" of exposure means what exactly? Continuous exposure at what interval? xposure at the 1st and 15th min? How many inbetween? GAEN may have solved much of that problem, but at the cost of data for contact tracers. In my mind, simple beats clever, which is exactly where the QR check-in apps have flourished.
zmmmmm 5y ago
It's a shame the article has such a rambling style and seems to take forever to get to the main point, which in the end isn't sufficiently fleshed out. I want to see substantiated the claim that any of these apps anywhere in the world were able to make a big impact on contact tracing. I am not aware of that being the case. The government report into it is a scandal and should be torn apart. The fact it is almost entirely redacted except for one mildly complimentary sentence is outrageous. But I'm more interested in the simple question of whether it could work or not. There is still time even now in which it could make an impact if it is possible.
conz 5y ago
I have no comment on the rest of the-fine-article, bu this statement is incorrect: Our two largest cities (Sydney and Melbourne) right now are in a continued state of lockdown, with the various states pursuing a COVID19 eradication strategy which has caused immense social and financial damage to our society. Australia's two most populous states (New South Wales and Victoria, the main jurisdictions presently under lock-down) are not pursuing any COVID19 eradication strategy; that boat sailed months ago when the NSW government failed to lock-down sufficiently when the Delta strain hit, thus infecting many of the other states and New Zealand through that lack of action. The evident strategy being pursued by these two states is one of protecting the health system by ensuring it isn't overrun by COVID cases, while also giving as many people as possible the chance to vaccinate. Once 80% of the populace is vaccinated (and I concur with the author of the piece here that that should have been achieved months ago), then most of the lock-down measures will cease. It also means that anyone who opts not to vaccinate (and kids under 12, and the immuno-compromised who cannot vaccinate) will have to fend for themselves.
tonfreed 5y ago
The contact tracing seems really arbitrary. My father in law got a text telling him he'd been at a tier 2 site.... 16 days after the fact.
jancker 5y ago
it looks to me just a blog promoting himself (the author) lol.. i've heard this story about covidsafe app, none of the countries in the world were fully successful in implementing contact tracing app, lets accept that. i just find it funny, maybe the guy wants to be famous. lol

74 points by ghuntley 5y ago

For anyone not from Australia, there is more to the story than "police officers assaulting unarmed civilians" just because they were not following covid regulations. That being said, the footage where that was taken was in response to, I agree, a series of non-optimally handled situations.

throwawaythekey 5y ago
It's closer to "police officers assaulting protesting civilians who refused to stop protesting"

Gatsky 5y ago

Great article. The hot take at the beginning on the end of liberal democracy is a bit silly. Anyone in Melbourne can tell you that the protestors are almost all just looking for a fight with the police while in various states of intoxication. The protests started the day after the path out of lockdown was announced. It started with a tantrum from the construction industry about being shutdown (they’ve been allowed to work all this time), but was then taken over by young men wanting to smash stuff and have a dust up with riot police. It is about as far from BLM as you can imagine.

wombatmobile 5y ago
> The hot take at the beginning on the end of liberal democracy is a bit silly. I found the article difficult to follow because of that. Is it a political statement? A frustrated rant by a concerned parent? A technical article? I read the whole article, but am unclear without going through its references, which I haven't done. This is where an editor, even just a detached friend, would help. Author seems to be saying they have effective telemetric contact tracing apps in Europe? Is he saying the Australian app is based on the European model but has unfixed bugs, or is he saying the Australian app uses a flawed model?
- ImaCake 5y ago
  I agree this needs an editor. It is hard to follow. I can forgive anyone in Australia for being frustrated right now. We have done really well against COVID but the two largest states are in lockdown until vaccination rates get high enough. People need someone of something to blame. Somewhere they can release their rage. Hopefully we will be past all this by christmas.
angelzen 5y ago
The casualness. Construction industry was allowed to work. Turns out the right to work is predicated on the state of the ultimate gauge of human worth, covid-cases-per-million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_work
- tomrod 5y ago
  The "allowance" to work started long before COVID-19. Zoning, licensing, etc.
cavisne 5y ago
Yeah no young men looking to smash stuff and fight police in BLM https://fukkot.com/riots/all/ https://fukkot.com/riots/all/
- nsonha 5y ago
  this is not a BLM discussion so idk why you posted those video here
solzh 5y ago
This is blatant misinformation. Melbourne has been the most locked down city in the world. Understandably, the working class for whom WFH is not an option, have had enough. The protests are predominantly second/third generation Mediterranean immigrants, women, and children. As Scandinavia rolls back all restrictions, Australian media work in concert with the government to stifle any dissent as the country spirals deeper into totalitarianism. Citizens are unable to leave the country, a violation of the UN declaration of Human Rights. This is what fascism looks like: https://twitter.com/RitaPanahi/status/1441323043687518221 https://twitter.com/RitaPanahi/status/1441323043687518221 https://twitter.com/beingrealmac/status/1441687633911074816 https://twitter.com/beingrealmac/status/1441687633911074816 https://twitter.com/K_for_rats/status/1441380783676030983 https://twitter.com/K_for_rats/status/1441380783676030983
- ImaCake 5y ago
  For those not from Australia; we are not about to become a fascist state. The parent comment’s other complaints about inequality are indeed true and our government has failed them. Lockdown sucks and is problematic. There are riots and the media is of course following the government line. But these lockdowns will end and some level of normalcy restored.
- Gatsky 5y ago
  I live in Melbourne. Trust me, I’m not misinformed. You can leave the country by the way (I’ve done it), what is your source?
  - solzh 5y ago
    > If you are an Australian citizen or a permanent resident you cannot leave Australia due to COVID-19 restrictions unless you have an exemption. https://covid19.homeaffairs.gov.au/leaving-australia https://covid19.homeaffairs.gov.au/leaving-australia
    - Gatsky 5y ago
      There is a list of reasonable exemptions including work related travel.

llampx 5y ago

Australia is the example we should all strive to emulate in matters of national health, citizen rights and privacy regulation, as well as a forward-thinking climate policy. ... Not.

axolttl88 5y ago
Australia has a generally highly-regarded and affordable health care system (public and private).
- travoc 5y ago
  The part where they lock you in your house to keep you from getting sick was the crowning achievement.
  - pageandrew 5y ago
    My favorite part is when they deploy a massive police force to beat you up if you dare protest being locked in your house
    - 0xy 5y ago
      Not only that, but Victoria Police actually visit you at home if you're "planning to protest". That's right, thoughtcrimes will get you a visit from the same department which pepper sprayed a 70 year old woman after throwing her to the ground.
- nostrebored 5y ago
  Australian healthcare has left me unnecessarily hospitalized, waiting for care, and generally unsatisfied. Do not recommend
  - ostenning 5y ago
    I think that most western countries have healthcare systems on the brink of collapse and Australia is no exception unfortunately

blitzar 5y ago

The UK version is doing all these things correctly (by the authors definition), and its digital contact tracing is a total failure.

mnd999 5y ago
The UK gave up. I’m not sure why we’re even bothering keeping the contact tracing going. It’s impossible to track and trace when you have 30,000+ cases a day. The policy now is vaccines and (hopefully) mild symptoms.
- nradov 5y ago
  Contact tracing was doomed from the start. Once widespread community transmission got moving it was simply impossible to trace so many people.
  - blitzar 5y ago
    Either movement has to be low (i.e. full lockdowns) or cases have to be low. If 'the start' is early enough, I expect the impact could be material (as per for example Australia) once the spread picks up steam, however, it is just a £40bn vanity project.

smoldesu 5y ago

I wish I could read your van article, but it says that I'm not "subscribed". What exactly does that mean in the context of a blog? Is there some 'Pricing' page that I glossed over by accident?

ghuntley 5y ago
I'll open it up. All content is free but older content is for newsletter subscribers only. See www.ghuntley.com/newsletter

top_post 5y ago

The thing about Australia is we love to walk eyes wide open into failure. We watch policies being implemented in other countries with real world data to learn from, and will then just unabashedly ignore it and do it all ourselves to achieve the exact same outcomes. This is across technology, politics, climate, business, the works. It's ingrained culturally and will never change.

solzh 5y ago
> Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Australia doesn't have to be competent, it can just dig up its vast mineral wealth, share the riches among its very small population, and think that skill and competence had something to do with it. By comparison, I'm amazed at places like South Korea, Japan and Israel that get by on sheer innovation and technology.
  - nsonha 5y ago
    a very unfair characterization of Australia, we also invest heavily in institutional education, as an export, wine producing, tourism and other pretentious things like that. You see innovation is about profit margin, technology is for China and that kind of countries.
  - mmerlin 5y ago
    The "small population" who benefit most are the corrupted politicians and mining magnates. and their hangers-on. Average Australians (including heavy manufacturers) often pay approximately double for our own gas, than Japan and China do, even when liquefaction and transport are included. Victoria is looking to build a gas import terminal to re-purchase Australian gas via a 3rd party country, and this will actually save money, because the system is that bad and Liberal govt refuses to activate the "gas reservation" law they passed in parliament (but never called into action) as a warning to the gas cartel to slightly reduce the price gouging. As another example, Qatar exports less volume of gas than Australia but their country earns 2000% more royalties that Australia because of our self-interest-first political class playing the "game of mates" for cushy jobs (board of directors etc) for these traitors post-politics. Norway is a much better example of how to do things with less corruption than Australia. They created a sovereign wealth fund that has saved well over $100 Billion. Australia in contrast voted in Tony Abbott whose platform consisted of "ax the mining tax" and like sheep people voted for it to save money for the magnates and collect even less resource taxes for the benefit of all. Australia does have a "future fund" of saved cash but that is ONLY for politician's financial benefit, not the population in general.

dustinmoris 5y ago

Does Australia still think that lockdowns do actually anything good? Lolz My condolences to all victims of lockdown.

robbiep 5y ago
They’re regrettable, they’re economically disruptive, and they must end, but absolutely - they save lives and we’re in the midst of a pandemic. No-one here wants to see the level of death and misery that has been visited on other countries that have been unable to get their case numbers under control.
shirro 5y ago
No, everyone, everywhere thinks lockdowns suck. They have them because they thought it was better than the alternative. Not sure if it has though because they have gone on so long. The other states have done everything they can to keep kids in schools, businesses open and people getting incomes. We had 10 days total lockdown in my state since this started which I think were probably 10 more than we needed but they went on the information we had at the time. I have complete freedom of movement within my state and with most other states. See lots of active construction and people working and I can go to the shops, restaurants, bars and sporting events though they have some restrictions on density. Condolences to the families of people who have died from covid everywhere. Can't blame people for doing whatever they could to protect their local community but happy most of Australia avoided both covid and the hardships that went with fighting it. We were very fortunate.
- dustinmoris 5y ago
  The people who are meant to die from COVID will die when you open up again. By the way death is part of life as much as is birth. Without death we couldn’t live. We should be happy about people dying by natural causes rather than by guns or war. If anything, the more people die by a natural cause like COVID the better for the world, because imagine how much carbon we set off by every person less eating beef, driving a car or flying a plane. Lockdowns are the most ridiculous and inefficient stupid thing.

nsonha 5y ago

> If you think these lockdowns are not a concern, I'm going to flat out say it here - you are sitting in an immense position of privilege I'd even say if you work from home then you should not have an opinion about lockdown. Because it's more about protecting other people and it's neither you who has to make any kind of decision, or trade-off because of lockdown.

tim-- 5y ago

One of the biggest failures of COVIDSafe in Australia was that it was so heavily bashed by everyone on it's initial release. Anyone who was anyone binned it as soon as it was released. With an app like COVIDSafe, where you require to have mass adoption of the app to work (there is no use having 10% of phones operating in the wild with the app installed, you require more like 80-90%, ideally every phone running the app.) Instead, every techie I spoke to either hated it wasn't open source; or used the fact that the app was based on Singapore's app, but was not subsequently open sourced itself. I feel that if the powers that be had changed the way that the source was developed, worked with the public a little closer that maybe these issues would not have existed. But sadly, the damage for COVIDSafe was already done in the first few weeks. There was no resuscitation possible. I liken it to how the AstraZeneca vaccine was dissed in the media. A small chance of clots was heralded as a major issue, which lead to a extremely slow uptake of a vaccine that is for the most part perfectly fine. Add to that the fact that privacy was never really enacted for the use of the data gathered by COVIDSafe (and other similar contact tracing tools, for example in Sydney, NSW https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/breach-of-trust-police-using-qr-check-in-data-to-solve-crimes-20210903-p58om8.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/breach-of-trust-poli... ) and you have a perfect storm of an app that no-one really keeps installed. COVIDSafe was dead on arrival.

afgdfgaefdg 5y ago
>I liken it to how the AstraZeneca vaccine was dissed in the media. u shouldnt there was a short point before delta in the uk where (healthy) young people were more at risk from clotting of AZ than contracting rona this sort of revisionism isnt healthy
alerighi 5y ago
> I liken it to how the AstraZeneca vaccine was dissed in the media. A small chance of clots was heralded as a major issue, which lead to a extremely slow uptake of a vaccine that is for the most part perfectly fine. It's less safe, there were some deaths, and also it protects less than alternatives like Pfizer and Moderna. So there is no point in that vaccine, in my country they first banned it for people under 60, and now they are no longer using it, choosing only to use Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (that uses the better mRNA technology).

jeeeb 5y ago

The COVIDSafe app was a failure and waste of tax payer money. Everyone knows it. The federal government has spent the last year and a half trying to change the narrative, mostly unsuccessfully. State governments developed their own QR code based systems which seem to work.. up to a limit. Those systems worked to stop multiple outbreaks - e.g. NSW contract traced their way out of several outbreaks without significant restrictions. The question I felt was unanswered by the article is have overseas apps actually delivered significantly better results than that? The actual big difference between Australia and most other developed nations seems to be that we are behind on our vaccine rollout and more willing/able to restrict individual movement, especially across state borders. Our vaccine rollout should catch up over the next month or so. NSW is approaching 90% first doses for over 16’s. VIC is approaching 80%. The dose spacing for AZ is particularly long, and at least VIC is using 6 week spacing for Pfizer so Australia tends to lag more on 2nd dose figures but that gap will close over the coming month. On a side note, all the information the author wishes was in the COVIDSafe app is also readily available on state government websites - e.g. coronavirus.vic.gov.au. Personally I prefer having this information on a website than in an app.

ghuntley 5y ago
> The question I felt was unanswered by the article is have overseas apps actually delivered significantly better results than that? 1. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AusOpenTech/COVIDSafe-Report/main/Report%20on%20the%20operation%20and%20effectiveness%20of%20the%20COVIDSafe%20application.pdf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AusOpenTech/COVIDSafe-Repo... 2. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.04.21257951v4 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.04.21257951v...
- jeeeb 5y ago
  My question was have contract tracing apps overseas performed significantly better than the QR based systems used in Australia (instead of COVIDSafe). Neither of these links seem to show that. The first is a criticism of COVIDSafe. I agree it was crap, but have Bluetooth based contract tracing actually worked well to prevent outbreaks anywhere? Is it actually better than QR code based systems? The second paper you link at least attempts to model this but it’s just that, conclusions drawn from a simulation. In practice there have been many more cases and deaths in Washington State alone than all of Australia, and that’s without adjusting for the much larger population in Australia.

nsonha 5y ago

> Instead of putting the information that people need on peoples phones in the COVIDSafe application everyone in Australia has had to tune into regularly scheduled TV broadcasts I thought it was just me who finds this incredibly stupid. This shows how weak the media in our country is. Instead of focusing on news-worthy events, it acts like government's bitch and just gives them air time for a daily conference whose sole purpose is reading out empty numbers. A lot of people say Dan Andrews (Victoria's Premier) worked very hard. Based on what? The fact that he shows up on TV everyday reading statistics out loud? A busy man would not do that.

alerighi 5y ago

Digital contact tracing was a failure in practically every country, and there is a techincal problem: all these apps uses Bluetooth to measure the distance, since GPS impacts privacy too much, and also battery life on the device, and doesn't work well in closed spaces. But you cannot have enought resolution with bluetooth to distinguish between 1 meter and 2 meters (the distance that is considered safe), you can have precision in tens of meters. Also you get a ton of false positives, for example caused by people that passes nearby buy you don't came in contact with (e.g. people in the car near you when you are stopped in the traffic). Finally the idea that people wants to collaborate is pure utopia, yes there are people that wants, but the majority of people don't want to install an app that if they possibly came in contact with one people that have the virus (something that if we all install the app was certain, at least in the last winter) will force you to isolate for 14 days, that includes not going to work without getting money for sickness since you are techincailly not ill. Basically it's a failure the whole concept of digital contact tracing, not the implementations.

AdrianB1 5y ago
In Australia there were more problems, see some other comments providing the details.
nradov 5y ago
There is no reliable scientific evidence that 2m is "safe". It's an arbitrary number. The WHO recommends 1m. It's really more a matter of airflow than distance. https://www.who.int/westernpacific/emergencies/covid-19/information/physical-distancing https://www.who.int/westernpacific/emergencies/covid-19/info...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

Can we get Mike Cannon Brookes in the comments again telling us to trust the government on COVIDSafe while forgetting to say Atlassian were helping develop COVIDSafe

0xy 5y ago
That explains why the app is hot garbage. The creators of JIRA were behind it.

LawnGnome 5y ago

> Australia right now is in a continued state of lockdown _Some_ of Australia is in a state of lockdown. This includes Sydney and Melbourne, Australia's two largest cities, but the majority of states are currently not in lockdown. Don't get me wrong: the response to the pandemic from Australia's federal government has been dreadful, and I'm not a huge fan of the police-oriented approach some states have used when they've been locked down either. But I think the first few paragraphs are alarmist and exaggerated, and that discredits the excellent discussion of the technical failures later in the article.

ghuntley 5y ago
Thanks for being my editor. Tweaked!
- fragmede 5y ago
  It still takes a bit of scrolling to get past the unreadable alarmism, fyi.
  - ghuntley 5y ago
    If anything is not factual then https://ghuntley.com/contact https://ghuntley.com/contact and I'll make adjustments. These lockdowns have been savage have caused immense social and financial damage to our society. You would feel similar if you were in my shoes.
    - anotherevan 5y ago
      I am in your shoes, and while I agree that the lock-downs have been damaging, I (and I think a good percentage of Australians) believe that not locking down would have been a lot worse. It was probably the best of the range of bad choices available.
      - exodust 5y ago
        Just because people agreed with initial "2 week snap lockdowns", doesn't mean they still agree with never-ending lockdowns, curfews and closed borders (even for vaxxed / negative test people). Many people have family interstate. There is no end in sight to lockdowns because the measures they use are case-based, not vaccination, despite what we're being told. The states with zero cases don't want to accept the endemic reality of Covid. They are enjoying their Oasis too much.

account15151315 5y ago

I saw some amazing analysis from some of the folks in the group Geoff mentions. It was calm, objective and measured, and didn't attempt to draw conclusions that couldn't be backed by observable fact. Disappointingly, there was also a class of analysis (coming from a smaller part of the group) that was based conjecture or guesswork that fuelled a narrative of COVIDSafe that was wrong or inaccurate. I saw this bring out both the best side of the tech community (methodical, analytical, evidence-based, objective) and the worst (conspiracy-driven, inflammatory, chaotic) that was dejecting. I felt the former was committed to making conclusions from observations, whereas the latter made observations to fit the conclusions they wanted to reach. Doing so in the public domain alongside legitimate analysis simply gave credibility to unfounded and baseless conclusions. Geoff's analysis says: >These problems would not have existed had Australia chosen the Exposure Notification Framework (GAEN) path. however this would never have helped out contact tracing, which he says is his motivation: >Medical professionals (contact tracers) deserve technical tools that work. Forcing them (via political pressure) to use ineffective tools robs them of precious time which could be better spent contact tracing. This is disingenous and trivialises the situation. One of the value propositions behind the BlueTrace stack was to provide greater visibility to contact tracers, by giving them access to the data in cases of close contacts. The app development was in full swing well before Apple & Google had established their notification protocol. Using BlueTrace was a smart move at the time, as it leveraged a model that had already been rolled out to Singapore. Of course, there were/are obvious challenges with this model (e.g. the unreliability of iOS) - but at the time, there was a true need to get something out, and to their credit this was turned around exceptionally fast in the absence of anything else. Chucking it out and starting again simply because GAEN was released would have been a misfire, particularly where it could have been accommodated by a future release. The shift away from BlueTrace to something like GAEN would have represented a significant shift away from the fundamental promise of the system - that contact tracers get access to the contact data. Whether you agree with that decision or not, that was COVIDSafe's policy objective. There are/were many legitimate issues with COVIDSafe that made the product (in my opinion) non-viable: the combination of the definition of a close contact was "1.5m + 15 min exposure time" with the means of recording encounters made using it all the time nonsensical, but also seems inconsistent with how we know COVID spreads (well, especially the delta strain). Many fleeting or substantial encounters would be completely missed, because they didn't satisfy that requirement, even though we would be legitimately concerned about them now. Add to that fact that deriving distance from BT strength is something that's challenging to do right and is only so accurate if done perfectly. But harder than that - recording "15 mins" of exposure means what exactly? Continuous exposure at what interval? xposure at the 1st and 15th min? How many inbetween? GAEN may have solved much of that problem, but at the cost of data for contact tracers. In my mind, simple beats clever, which is exactly where the QR check-in apps have flourished.

zmmmmm 5y ago

It's a shame the article has such a rambling style and seems to take forever to get to the main point, which in the end isn't sufficiently fleshed out. I want to see substantiated the claim that any of these apps anywhere in the world were able to make a big impact on contact tracing. I am not aware of that being the case. The government report into it is a scandal and should be torn apart. The fact it is almost entirely redacted except for one mildly complimentary sentence is outrageous. But I'm more interested in the simple question of whether it could work or not. There is still time even now in which it could make an impact if it is possible.

conz 5y ago

I have no comment on the rest of the-fine-article, bu this statement is incorrect: Our two largest cities (Sydney and Melbourne) right now are in a continued state of lockdown, with the various states pursuing a COVID19 eradication strategy which has caused immense social and financial damage to our society. Australia's two most populous states (New South Wales and Victoria, the main jurisdictions presently under lock-down) are not pursuing any COVID19 eradication strategy; that boat sailed months ago when the NSW government failed to lock-down sufficiently when the Delta strain hit, thus infecting many of the other states and New Zealand through that lack of action. The evident strategy being pursued by these two states is one of protecting the health system by ensuring it isn't overrun by COVID cases, while also giving as many people as possible the chance to vaccinate. Once 80% of the populace is vaccinated (and I concur with the author of the piece here that that should have been achieved months ago), then most of the lock-down measures will cease. It also means that anyone who opts not to vaccinate (and kids under 12, and the immuno-compromised who cannot vaccinate) will have to fend for themselves.

tonfreed 5y ago

The contact tracing seems really arbitrary. My father in law got a text telling him he'd been at a tier 2 site.... 16 days after the fact.

jancker 5y ago

it looks to me just a blog promoting himself (the author) lol.. i've heard this story about covidsafe app, none of the countries in the world were fully successful in implementing contact tracing app, lets accept that. i just find it funny, maybe the guy wants to be famous. lol