I wonder how this will go down with Palantir and Faculty - I can't imagine this was in their game plan.
I'm in the UK and I've almost given up on watching the news as it seems every step taken by the government is weeks behind where it should be, and taken in a reactive way, rather than there being any kind of proactive, coordinated response to the crisis. This is welcome, but months behind when it should have happened - plenty of discussion on here said the route they were trying to take wouldn't work for technical reasons, aside from one's of privacy.
By the time this is up and running, it'll be irrelevant.
I was involved with free laptops for pupils scheme much trumpeted by UK Government in their press briefings. We finally took delivery of 4 (between 250 children!) on Thursday, months after it was promised and 4 days before children started returning to school...
The whole thing is political (the two party system is a disaster). I don't think Boris wanted lock down or any other curbs on freedom - that's not in his character. I expect he would have preferred the Swedish approach, but he's trying to win over the left, which is fairly futile because they'll always find something to shout at him about.
I just don't understand how the UK, a modern first world democracy, can be quite so far behind every other country.
They're still debating a quarantine for new arrivals, contact tracing is yet to really start, testing lagged significantly...
It's an island nation, it should have had a head-and-shoulders advantage over continental Europe with full potential for an outcome closer to New Zealand or Australia rather than the US or Brazil.
The quarantine for new arrivals has been in effect for 10 days [1].
Contact tracing was launched on 28th May [2].
It seems to me that what went wrong was a large number of UK residents were overseas in February/March (sspecially on ski breaks) to Italy, France and other mainland Europe destinations. The Government didn't impose any emergency isolation or quarantine on those arriving, as was the case for those arriving on repatriation flights from Hubei and other Chinese destinations.
Given much of the scientific analysis of the virus points to strains being descended from those in mainland Europe, it seems a key reason the UK wasn't "head and shoulders" ahead was the scale of this international leisure travel to countries that ended up most affected. Had those returning been put into quarantine, there might have been a very different outcome, but it's hard to say for sure.
I'm not disagreeing with the statement, we've done very poorly, but I feel comparisons to Australia, and especially NZ are way off, London is the city with the most air traffic globally and the virus was here much earlier than the point in time we were asked to stay at home, we might be a relatively small island nation but we're also one of the busiest.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that policy in relation to care homes is likely to have been a factor which made things significantly worse in the UK. Patients were deliberately moved out of hospitals into care homes without tests for SARS-CoV-2 infection, in order to free up hospital beds, and in so doing gave the virus to other residents of those homes.
Our care home sector was also more vulnerable than most because it (a) consists of individual care homes which are relatively large and (b) is staffed in large part by agency staff who work in multiple homes.
We're not the only country or region which made this mistake of course and this wasn't the only mistake made but the surprising thing is how long it took for the government to recognise and correct this. Part of that is probably human nature ("we have a plan, stick to the plan"), but I suspect part of it is old-fashioned civil service incompetence too (the same incompetence which led to this being the plan to start with).
>I just don't understand how the UK, a modern first world democracy, can be quite so far behind every other country.
They're not. What version of "every country" do you have in mind? Most other countries also failed at contact tracing early on. The only country in Europe that had and used effective contact tracing was Germany. Almost everywhere else it has made little or not contribution.
If you look at the epi curves then the UK, France, Spain, and Italy have had basically the same outbreak (France a little less). So there is no need to wonder why the UK is special because it isn't. There is plenty to say about which European countries responded well and which didn't and why even Germany's response was markedly inferior to countries like Vietnam but that has to start from a data driven perspective that doesn't pretend that the UK is particularly special.
honestly, the british governments response can (as is often the case) be summed up by this clip (18sec) from yes Minister (the 4 stages) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6BW-mvkRjE
On the island bit - the travel situation is quite different to NZ. We have a lot more traffic for business, multiple busy airports, a rail link to the Schengen area and cheap access to international travel. We probably had a lot more routes for the virus to get in, and I think the assumption now is that it was circulating since the winter (although most of the news websites I can find are screaming tabloids).
Politically, locking down borders was not palatable to the government - I don't think we ever closed the border actually, we just made it very impractical for people to travel. Someone was actually able to get to Paris for a haircut a month or so ago.
It's a case of "plans are worthless but planning is essential". After the 2009 swine flu, the UK planned heavily for pandemic influenza, stockpiled millions of doses of tamiflu, etc. When the coronavirus came, instead of making a new plan for coronavirus they decided to just stick to the influenza plan, based on the reasoning that all pandemics are the same. Only, the two diseases are very different and by the time they realised that an influenza playbook wasn't going to cut it, it was way too late.
I mean, they try. Compared to the US government the UK government doesn’t feel architected in any way, it’s just entirely wacky tradition. The House of Lords is totally bizarre for example and that makes me question both the “modern” and “democracy” part.
Then again we have the parts of the USG responsible for the CFR (as opposed to the US code which comes from the democratic part) which is kind of the same thing (I can’t remember what they’re called off the top of my head.)
A government was elected to "get Brexit done", despite being patently (and provably) hopeless at everything else. Then "Everything else" suddenly became really important, and here we are.
Pride is the first thing that comes to mind, it would also explain why they drive on the opposite side of the road, have a separate faucet for hot water, and so on and so forth.
They wanted herd immunity, but they couldn’t do it during flu season, so they went for flattening the curve which they succeeded with. Now flu seasons over they’ve got the capacity to deal with a surge in cases so they’re easing lockdown, they want to create a massive measles party for the summer, so by the time flu season starts again they won’t have to worry too much about another lockdown. Remember the worst case scenario was 500,000 to 1 million deaths. They got away with 40,000
This is just yet another case of the UK government insisting they know best, continuing down a stupid path despite watching everyone else successfully walking the opposite direction. From locking down late, to stopping contact tracing early, to not mass-testing, to releasing infected people into care homes. Just pure arrogance / incompetence.
This is a win for privacy - the previous model used a centralised "anonymous" database, with the idea being that the data could then be mined for various purposes officially relating to spotting outbreaks and the like. Obviously, this sounds very big-brothery since it would have been a database of who was where with who and when etc.
Not sure if this sudden outbreak of common sense was due to either:
a) technical difficulties of doing something hacky with iOS to try and make the background bluetooth approach work or implementing the backend,
b) something else usurping the need for the data mining (e.g. perhaps the much-trumpeted track-and-trace system where people self-report/voluntarily tell the government who they spend time with)
c) actually caring about people's privacy.
Probably a combination of a + b I expect. c feels like a longshot.
The government had already basically eaten the bad press on the privacy aspects of their design vs the Google/Apple API... I wonder what prompted this.
I know that the app used a kind of hack to allow for Bluetooth during sleep (something missing from the Aus app) - maybe they were told that was going to be patched out?
I really think this must be related to it not working as intended rather than anything political.
The UK "hack" for the bluetooth was quite clever from what I saw - in essence they implemented the "background discovery of an iPhone" feature.
One concern I do have with this approach is that the decentralised system inherently can only model the "risk-to" an individual from an epidemiological perspective. It can't model the "risk-from" side of things. To avoid Sybil type attacks, you need to use centrally issued (and thus verifiable) test results to notify others.
Unless tests are administered very promptly, with results immediately available, it seems difficult to make this work in the decentralised approach - with a mean and median "time to symptoms" of around 5.1 days [1], and someone at their most infectious for the 1 to 2 days prior to experiencing symptoms, it seems decentralised apps will struggle.
If A is infected on day 0, then on day 3 they may infect B and C. On day 5, A experiences symptoms, goes online, and requests a test, saying they have symptoms. They realistically would get a test the following day. and the result the day after that. That would be day 7, and at that point, B and C might be notified by the app. The issue is that B and C are now on day 4 of their own infections, the second day of their most infectious period, walking around unaware. They find out the day before they would themselves (on average) experience symptoms.
Clearly the virus is not as deterministic in behaviour as in this simple model, but the above seems to suggest to me that to get any real value out of this (i.e. preventing the next generation of infection), you need to either be able to respond to symptoms reports, or significantly expedite the testing process. In the above situation, a same-day test-and-result would enable B and C to be notified on day 2 or early on day 3 of their own infection, potentially having some real impact. But to achieve this, the latency of testing would need to drop hugely.
The health minister overseeing it suggested it could be delayed until winter yesterday citing both concerns about public response to the method (which sounds like a bit of a vacant excuse) and unspecified 'technical challenges'.[1] I'd speculate that this is a case of the original technique not being a success on the Isle of Wight tests and a change of approach to lean on the device/OS manufacturers rather than try and work around them.
Yes - the Australian app has all sorts of hacky workarounds, at least on iOS, such as notifications once or twice a day which ask you to foreground the app and 'make sure it is running'. Hopefully we will get an update here to use the new APIs.
This triggers the question: why is the app not available worldwide in the first place? And why should every country develop their own? Since Apple and Google are already providing an "Exposure Notification system", shouldn't such an app be distributed natively (i.e. not through a geo-blocked app store), like the Phone or Compass apps? I understand this would mean the app should be developed, or at least released, by Apple and Google directly. But since they're already helping out with the notification system, we're halfway there. I also understand there are lots of legal and regulatory implications for having a worldwide app, but I feel like we're past this point already.
Sorry if I'm sounding naive, but people are going to start traveling again, so limiting a tracing app to a country's borders seems arbitrarily inefficient to say the least.
This is actually a problem. I’m in Sweden, but as it’s really hard to transfer my Apple account from the UK (especially with a family account) I’ve never bothered. So am I going to not have access to Sweden’s contract tracing app if one is built?
This is a lot of noise about something that, unless it is made compulsory as some Asian countries have done, will likely end up like the Norwegian effort: 2% install rate and hence useless.
I think they were right to try for an ambitious model that tried to do things that the Google-Apple model didn't.
I also think they should have developed two apps in parallel from the beginning. It would hardly have cost much more when you consider the benefits and it would mean that the decision to move from one to the other could be made immediately. (I know they've been working on a Google/Apple one but not sure how much work has gone into it.)
The centralised approach is 'better' for the stated aims but it is harder to reliably develop.
I suspect that they concluded that the whole system won't be ready soon enough (ideally it should have been deployed by now) and so they are switching to something they can deploy faster.
In any case I suspect that these apps will make very little difference because they will come too late, not be used widely enough, and provide too little actionable data.
Why does everyone seem to think coronavirus death stats are like a score of how well your government is doing in response to the pandemic. If you didn't manage to stop the virus entering your country, which you can't without destroying international travel and your economy, then the end game is 60-70 percent of your population having had it. As long as people aren't dying in your country due to lack of medical care then you've not done too bad right?
We cannot avoid most people contracting this virus so why are people keeping running totals of deaths as a score card? I guess we like the idea that we could have stopped it and it gives us a sense of control and something to rage against.
The UK government is estimating that 1/1000 people have had it already. If true that means our final death toll could be in the millions right?
we don't talk about that thou, we just say, lockdown should have happened a week earlier! We could have saved 2000 lives. Ok, is that 2000 lives OVERALL, like final figures or is it just 2000 lives by this point?
And the idea that it's just the UK government... 1/6 people said they'd ignore the governments advise on face coverings on public transport. Basically the UK is a load of raging, entitled children for the most part, we don't want to sacrifice anything and we want other people to fix things for us... Cos it's "their job"
These comments have the expected pessimism from anything UK related, but after watching the disaster of France's home-grown centralised app this seems like a smart choice.
Interesting comment from the BBC article that I had not thought about before:
> "make the app compatible with other countries' counterparts, which are based on the same system "
So if multiple countries are using the Apple-Google system, we'll have an international system that anyone can use? I guess this bodes well for future international travel over the next 12/18 months (... or until the vaccines etc are ready) since we'd still get the benefits if we are in compatible countries.
There is an interesting discussion to be had about contact tracing apps and choice of model, most of the internet and all of the press will not be having it.
(Ill informed and barely remembered fragments that somehow Palantir / Cummings / Satan's niece was involved in this app are nonsense. Palantir is doing some internal data vis work and both apps are being built by the same team anyway)
The first thing to consider is whether this has led to a real delay in roll-out. We don't know that so far, but we do know that they actually started work on an app based on the Google-Apple API more than a month ago and very few countries have done a full roll-out of an app based on that API yet (and those quite recently). We also know that these approaches work better after "full lockdown" because during the lockdown contacts are already massively suppressed. If it hasn't led to a delay, then the inevitable wailing and gnashing of teeth will be completely irrelevant. Optionality is good, the more things tried the better.
The second is to acknowledge that one of the issues with the (very good idea) of partially or wholly anonymous contact tracing is that apparently people don't like receiving this news from an app interface. That makes an app which interfaces which the rest of the contact tracing system like the one that NHSX originally built a better bet.
The third is to realise that there is as yet no evidence that these solutions work at all. We know that fully centralised contact tracing (which includes a geolocation tracking app) works in Asia. Nobody knows if either the fully decentralised DP-3T system developed by Apple/Google or the partially decentralised PEPP-PT/Robert system developed by NHSX will works.
The fourth is that if you can make it work around phone OS restrictions, there are very real advantages to the NHSX original design which simply cannot be replicated with a fully decentralised system.
There are two which are particularly noteworthy.
First, you can extract aggregated local infection data from the NHSX system which can drive granular local lockdowns.
Second, rather more significantly, because of the central control element, you can revoke notifications. That's important because revokeable notifications allows you to take the risk of allowing some notifications based on symptom onset before a test has been conducted. Since the peak transmission window is around symptom onset and the incubation period is short, notifying early has very significant advantages. People will be irritated if they get a notification which is revoked 24 hours later and you do have to consider the behavioural elements but it is a useful capability to have.
You can also do exposure cohorting. If person A had 10 contacts in a three hour period and on day 8 after exposure none have developed symptoms, you may consider releasing them all from quarantine early. This requires developing quite a sophisticated risk model and carefully weighing up the tradeoffs - you may decide not to use it - but it is an extremely powerful thing to be able to do.
It has never been the case that the Google/Apple solution is "obviously better". Rather there are complex tradeoffs to be considered between different solutions. It would be one thing if we had data to show that the Google/Apple supported solution worked brilliantly. That would mean that the additional features the NHSX design has are not required and therefore the privacy tradeoff is not worth it. We don't though, we know that the a fully centralised panopticon nightmare system works in South Korea and China and we know that we don't want that.
(edit: obviously if they can't make their own app because of Bluetooth issues then the whole game ends and they have to switch)
(edit 2: it was apparently due to technical issues that they were not able to resolve. In denser areas the keepalive mechanism they built works well and keeps most iphones and androids visible for long periods of time but if you go through a period of not being around other phones, too many will drop out. Note that Bluetooth is an inherently challenging way of mapping distance and that this applies to any app which uses it)
[+] [-] djaychela|5 years ago|reply
I'm in the UK and I've almost given up on watching the news as it seems every step taken by the government is weeks behind where it should be, and taken in a reactive way, rather than there being any kind of proactive, coordinated response to the crisis. This is welcome, but months behind when it should have happened - plenty of discussion on here said the route they were trying to take wouldn't work for technical reasons, aside from one's of privacy.
By the time this is up and running, it'll be irrelevant.
[+] [-] kerrsclyde|5 years ago|reply
I was involved with free laptops for pupils scheme much trumpeted by UK Government in their press briefings. We finally took delivery of 4 (between 250 children!) on Thursday, months after it was promised and 4 days before children started returning to school...
[+] [-] rezeroed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noir_lord|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if I can have one day delivery on the worlds smallest violin.
[+] [-] plantain|5 years ago|reply
It's an island nation, it should have had a head-and-shoulders advantage over continental Europe with full potential for an outcome closer to New Zealand or Australia rather than the US or Brazil.
What went wrong?
[+] [-] adwww|5 years ago|reply
They can barely collectively tie their own shoes, yet suddenly they are responsible for managing the biggest peacetime crisis in our history.
[+] [-] g_p|5 years ago|reply
Contact tracing was launched on 28th May [2].
It seems to me that what went wrong was a large number of UK residents were overseas in February/March (sspecially on ski breaks) to Italy, France and other mainland Europe destinations. The Government didn't impose any emergency isolation or quarantine on those arriving, as was the case for those arriving on repatriation flights from Hubei and other Chinese destinations.
Given much of the scientific analysis of the virus points to strains being descended from those in mainland Europe, it seems a key reason the UK wasn't "head and shoulders" ahead was the scale of this international leisure travel to countries that ended up most affected. Had those returning been put into quarantine, there might have been a very different outcome, but it's hard to say for sure.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52774854
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
[+] [-] Accacin|5 years ago|reply
Personally, most of my friends and I decided to quarantine a few weeks before the government decided to ask people to do so.
I disagree about the contract tracing app though, I'm glad for any reason that it's delayed.
[+] [-] unfunco|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomatocracy|5 years ago|reply
Our care home sector was also more vulnerable than most because it (a) consists of individual care homes which are relatively large and (b) is staffed in large part by agency staff who work in multiple homes.
We're not the only country or region which made this mistake of course and this wasn't the only mistake made but the surprising thing is how long it took for the government to recognise and correct this. Part of that is probably human nature ("we have a plan, stick to the plan"), but I suspect part of it is old-fashioned civil service incompetence too (the same incompetence which led to this being the plan to start with).
[+] [-] Mvandenbergh|5 years ago|reply
They're not. What version of "every country" do you have in mind? Most other countries also failed at contact tracing early on. The only country in Europe that had and used effective contact tracing was Germany. Almost everywhere else it has made little or not contribution.
If you look at the epi curves then the UK, France, Spain, and Italy have had basically the same outbreak (France a little less). So there is no need to wonder why the UK is special because it isn't. There is plenty to say about which European countries responded well and which didn't and why even Germany's response was markedly inferior to countries like Vietnam but that has to start from a data driven perspective that doesn't pretend that the UK is particularly special.
[+] [-] youngNed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshvm|5 years ago|reply
Politically, locking down borders was not palatable to the government - I don't think we ever closed the border actually, we just made it very impractical for people to travel. Someone was actually able to get to Paris for a haircut a month or so ago.
https://www.euronews.com/2020/05/18/locked-down-brits-in-nee...
[+] [-] mantap|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|5 years ago|reply
I mean, they try. Compared to the US government the UK government doesn’t feel architected in any way, it’s just entirely wacky tradition. The House of Lords is totally bizarre for example and that makes me question both the “modern” and “democracy” part.
Then again we have the parts of the USG responsible for the CFR (as opposed to the US code which comes from the democratic part) which is kind of the same thing (I can’t remember what they’re called off the top of my head.)
[+] [-] toyg|5 years ago|reply
A government was elected to "get Brexit done", despite being patently (and provably) hopeless at everything else. Then "Everything else" suddenly became really important, and here we are.
[+] [-] tomcooks|5 years ago|reply
/s
[+] [-] ppf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drumhead|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonplackett|5 years ago|reply
(I'm British in case you wondered... sigh...)
[+] [-] mattlondon|5 years ago|reply
Not sure if this sudden outbreak of common sense was due to either:
a) technical difficulties of doing something hacky with iOS to try and make the background bluetooth approach work or implementing the backend,
b) something else usurping the need for the data mining (e.g. perhaps the much-trumpeted track-and-trace system where people self-report/voluntarily tell the government who they spend time with)
c) actually caring about people's privacy.
Probably a combination of a + b I expect. c feels like a longshot.
[+] [-] zpeti|5 years ago|reply
Win for privacy.
[+] [-] JoeSmithson|5 years ago|reply
I know that the app used a kind of hack to allow for Bluetooth during sleep (something missing from the Aus app) - maybe they were told that was going to be patched out?
I really think this must be related to it not working as intended rather than anything political.
[+] [-] g_p|5 years ago|reply
One concern I do have with this approach is that the decentralised system inherently can only model the "risk-to" an individual from an epidemiological perspective. It can't model the "risk-from" side of things. To avoid Sybil type attacks, you need to use centrally issued (and thus verifiable) test results to notify others.
Unless tests are administered very promptly, with results immediately available, it seems difficult to make this work in the decentralised approach - with a mean and median "time to symptoms" of around 5.1 days [1], and someone at their most infectious for the 1 to 2 days prior to experiencing symptoms, it seems decentralised apps will struggle.
If A is infected on day 0, then on day 3 they may infect B and C. On day 5, A experiences symptoms, goes online, and requests a test, saying they have symptoms. They realistically would get a test the following day. and the result the day after that. That would be day 7, and at that point, B and C might be notified by the app. The issue is that B and C are now on day 4 of their own infections, the second day of their most infectious period, walking around unaware. They find out the day before they would themselves (on average) experience symptoms.
Clearly the virus is not as deterministic in behaviour as in this simple model, but the above seems to suggest to me that to get any real value out of this (i.e. preventing the next generation of infection), you need to either be able to respond to symptoms reports, or significantly expedite the testing process. In the above situation, a same-day test-and-result would enable B and C to be notified on day 2 or early on day 3 of their own infection, potentially having some real impact. But to achieve this, the latency of testing would need to drop hugely.
[1] https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/03/09/coronavirus-incubation-period...
[+] [-] mrkwse|5 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-c...
[+] [-] angrygoat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zspitzer|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-app-android/issues/47...
[+] [-] bbx|5 years ago|reply
Sorry if I'm sounding naive, but people are going to start traveling again, so limiting a tracing app to a country's borders seems arbitrarily inefficient to say the least.
[+] [-] robin_reala|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JamesBaxter|5 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53083340
[+] [-] jjgreen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prepend|5 years ago|reply
This is the biggest question for me. I’m interested in the actual public health usefulness.
[+] [-] toyg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mvandenbergh|5 years ago|reply
I also think they should have developed two apps in parallel from the beginning. It would hardly have cost much more when you consider the benefits and it would mean that the decision to move from one to the other could be made immediately. (I know they've been working on a Google/Apple one but not sure how much work has gone into it.)
[+] [-] mytailorisrich|5 years ago|reply
I suspect that they concluded that the whole system won't be ready soon enough (ideally it should have been deployed by now) and so they are switching to something they can deploy faster.
In any case I suspect that these apps will make very little difference because they will come too late, not be used widely enough, and provide too little actionable data.
[+] [-] jonnypotty|5 years ago|reply
We cannot avoid most people contracting this virus so why are people keeping running totals of deaths as a score card? I guess we like the idea that we could have stopped it and it gives us a sense of control and something to rage against.
The UK government is estimating that 1/1000 people have had it already. If true that means our final death toll could be in the millions right? we don't talk about that thou, we just say, lockdown should have happened a week earlier! We could have saved 2000 lives. Ok, is that 2000 lives OVERALL, like final figures or is it just 2000 lives by this point?
And the idea that it's just the UK government... 1/6 people said they'd ignore the governments advise on face coverings on public transport. Basically the UK is a load of raging, entitled children for the most part, we don't want to sacrifice anything and we want other people to fix things for us... Cos it's "their job"
[+] [-] _Wintermute|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattlondon|5 years ago|reply
> "make the app compatible with other countries' counterparts, which are based on the same system "
So if multiple countries are using the Apple-Google system, we'll have an international system that anyone can use? I guess this bodes well for future international travel over the next 12/18 months (... or until the vaccines etc are ready) since we'd still get the benefits if we are in compatible countries.
[+] [-] underdeserver|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mvandenbergh|5 years ago|reply
(Ill informed and barely remembered fragments that somehow Palantir / Cummings / Satan's niece was involved in this app are nonsense. Palantir is doing some internal data vis work and both apps are being built by the same team anyway)
The first thing to consider is whether this has led to a real delay in roll-out. We don't know that so far, but we do know that they actually started work on an app based on the Google-Apple API more than a month ago and very few countries have done a full roll-out of an app based on that API yet (and those quite recently). We also know that these approaches work better after "full lockdown" because during the lockdown contacts are already massively suppressed. If it hasn't led to a delay, then the inevitable wailing and gnashing of teeth will be completely irrelevant. Optionality is good, the more things tried the better.
The second is to acknowledge that one of the issues with the (very good idea) of partially or wholly anonymous contact tracing is that apparently people don't like receiving this news from an app interface. That makes an app which interfaces which the rest of the contact tracing system like the one that NHSX originally built a better bet.
The third is to realise that there is as yet no evidence that these solutions work at all. We know that fully centralised contact tracing (which includes a geolocation tracking app) works in Asia. Nobody knows if either the fully decentralised DP-3T system developed by Apple/Google or the partially decentralised PEPP-PT/Robert system developed by NHSX will works.
The fourth is that if you can make it work around phone OS restrictions, there are very real advantages to the NHSX original design which simply cannot be replicated with a fully decentralised system.
There are two which are particularly noteworthy.
First, you can extract aggregated local infection data from the NHSX system which can drive granular local lockdowns.
Second, rather more significantly, because of the central control element, you can revoke notifications. That's important because revokeable notifications allows you to take the risk of allowing some notifications based on symptom onset before a test has been conducted. Since the peak transmission window is around symptom onset and the incubation period is short, notifying early has very significant advantages. People will be irritated if they get a notification which is revoked 24 hours later and you do have to consider the behavioural elements but it is a useful capability to have.
You can also do exposure cohorting. If person A had 10 contacts in a three hour period and on day 8 after exposure none have developed symptoms, you may consider releasing them all from quarantine early. This requires developing quite a sophisticated risk model and carefully weighing up the tradeoffs - you may decide not to use it - but it is an extremely powerful thing to be able to do.
It has never been the case that the Google/Apple solution is "obviously better". Rather there are complex tradeoffs to be considered between different solutions. It would be one thing if we had data to show that the Google/Apple supported solution worked brilliantly. That would mean that the additional features the NHSX design has are not required and therefore the privacy tradeoff is not worth it. We don't though, we know that the a fully centralised panopticon nightmare system works in South Korea and China and we know that we don't want that.
(edit: obviously if they can't make their own app because of Bluetooth issues then the whole game ends and they have to switch)
(edit 2: it was apparently due to technical issues that they were not able to resolve. In denser areas the keepalive mechanism they built works well and keeps most iphones and androids visible for long periods of time but if you go through a period of not being around other phones, too many will drop out. Note that Bluetooth is an inherently challenging way of mapping distance and that this applies to any app which uses it)
[+] [-] amcoastal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hubbabubbarex|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]