“The only way to make coronavirus tracking apps really work is to accept the burden of false alarms and track every person, all the time, everywhere. This is only possible in a totalitarian state such as China, yet even the Chinese government doesn’t have the resources to implement such extreme levels of monitoring. With advances in artificial intelligence, it is possible that it soon will—and when that day comes, China will be prepared for the next pandemic.”
“The rest of the world will probably take the virus over the cure.” By Salvatore Babones, an adjunct scholar at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney and an associate professor at the University of Sydney. Twitter: @sbabones https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/12/coronavirus-tracking-tracing-apps-cant-work-south-korea-singapore-australia (cont.d) The inconsistency between what the tracking apps measure and how the virus spreads puts governments in a bind. Set the time window too narrow, and the app will classify millions of people as possibly infected, requiring the government to track down everyone who has ever passed a coronavirus carrier on the street. Set the time window too wide, and the app will flag too few exposures to the virus. There is no “Goldilocks” zone in the middle of these two extremes. Set the threshold at 15 or 20 minutes of close proximity to an infected person, and the coronavirus app will identify a moderate number of people for health authorities to contact. But most of the people who have contracted the disease from the infected person casually—that supermarket sneeze comes to mind—will be missed. The other problem is that actual transmission events are rare compared to the number of interactions people have. To find those transmissions, you have to wade through an enormous number of casual contacts, and that means tracking down virtually everyone. Once governments reach that point, they’re no better off than if they had simply relied on effective but labor-intensive human contact tracing in the first place, without the app. The only way to make coronavirus tracking apps really work is to accept false alarms and track every person, all the time, everywhere. Unfortunately, the coronavirus simply does not spread in the way that epidemiologists model it statistically. That’s not necessarily a problem—for our understanding of broader progress of the pandemic. But the models usually simplify reality in ways that work on average, even if they don’t apply to any particular case. We’re therefore making a grave methodological error when we expect reality at the level of individual cases to reflect our models for the numbers overall, instead of the other way around. Any technological solution to the coronavirus pandemic has to be grounded in the reality of one-on-one transmission, not epidemiological statistics. _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
