I believe 90 minute tests for disease (not antibody), have been created. So not a stupid question at all.
Of course they still need to get distributed globally, too. Next up would be spot tests for antibodies, and this would change things significanty.Continuing in our wider discussion, Ross Anderson does a great write up of the UK situation, from technical to legal here: Contact Tracing in the Real World | Light Blue Touchpaper
Brilliant read, indeed, @eireann_leverett!
But contact tracing in the real world is not quite as many of the academic and industry proposals assume.
First, it isn’t anonymous. Covid-19 is a notifiable disease so a doctor who diagnoses you must inform the public health authorities, and if they have the bandwidth they call you and ask who you’ve been in contact with. They then call your contacts in turn. It’s not about consent or anonymity, so much as being persuasive and having a good bedside manner.
I’m relaxed about doing all this under emergency public-health powers, since this will make it harder for intrusive systems to persist after the pandemic than if they have some privacy theater that can be used to argue that the whizzy new medi-panopticon is legal enough to be kept running.
Emphasis mine. 
More analysis from the creator of fluphone here: A True History of the Internet: Some DP-3T & Apple/Google contact tracer abuse questions...
Ed Yong (loved his book on microbiomes!) weighs in with a very nice article about “the new normal”. There is an implication for Surveillance Pandemic: he predicts many resurgences (“whackamole”) of SARS-CoV-2, and recommends stomping them out with the WHO recipe of test-trace-treat. If that is true, maybe after all contact tracing apps are useful in this epidemic, no? @eireann_leverett @markomanka @simonaferlini, what do you think?
Austria, Poland, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and the UK already have government-sponsored covid trackers available according to this Github list.
Regarding whether or not trackers have a valid role to play in the current pandemic (as opposed to preparing for the next one), one scenario is social distance rules get relaxed and business gets going again, people get closer to each other and…the virus comes back. Would trackers be useful for that?
[Chipping in from Twitter, to explain my comment there: “We certainly need Contact Tracing; whether the apps will be of any use remains to be seen.”]
I see @eireann_leverett has linked to Ross Anderson’s post, which makes several of the points I think are most relevant; not just for the UK.
Without (near) universally available testing, the apps alone will have to rely on self-reporting which - combined with the many unresolved, very real issues around using ‘device proximity + time duration’ as a proxy for infection (not to mention deliberate misuse) - means the quality of information driving the alerts will likely be too low for the apps to retain credibility, thus compliance. Or, to paraphrase Ross, why would people self-isolate just because a slightly creepy experimental app with ‘invisible smarts’ tells them they should?
Contact tracing works because it erects a ‘barrier’ around a known infected person by testing everyone they’ve been in close contact with, and quarantining not only the original infected person but any who have been infected by them (and then the ones they’ve infected) - even before they are symptomatic. We don’t (only) need apps, for the apps to work - we need more human contact tracers and tests! (In the UK, probably around 20,000 of them.)
It is generally acknowledged that, all other issues aside, for the contact tracing app in the UK to ‘work’ (though it’s not entirely clear what the Governement means by that) would require 50-60% of the population to be using it - so, as a system, the apps act like a sort of ‘virtual herd immunity’.
Such uptake is clearly HUGELY ambitious - Singapore managed 12% - and, as I’ve said, the app alone (without testing) neither gets you the information quality you need for compliance, nor erects the specific ‘barriers’ around the infected that you need for effect. Once this becomes generally known amongst the public (i.e. as new cases rise again after lockdown is loosened, as is happening curently across Asia) then ‘the app’ is a bust.
So, until we either develop herd immunity naturally (at the cost of an unacceptably large numbers of deaths) or until we develop and distribute a vaccine, we are left with the Hammer and the Dance:
Tech developed in this pandemic may be able to help extend the gaps between lockdowns (I hope it will!) but we’re well past the point at which any contact tracing app could reasonably have helped contain the spread, so it’s about cycles of suppression & mitigation, as per, e.g.
@PhilBooth has captured most of what I might have said, and I don’t think I have much more to add here. I do believe apps and tech have some things they can do to help, but most of what is proposed and on offer isn’t helpful. To keep it simple, most “obvious” solutions in an emergency turn out to be counter productive. Like swimming against a rip tide…you need to know in advance that swimming along the shore gets you to the shore faster. You need to do your emergency homework in advance, and trust the experts. So for my contribution, I would argue you send every “develop an emergency app”/“do-something-itis” developer to work on future pandemic solutions, rather than give them reign in a crisis. Crisis leadership is something that can be studied, and developed. EdgeRyders is doing this here…balancing expert advice with people who know how to communicate it to the people who most need to hear it.
Thank you so much, @PhilBooth and @eireann_leverett, for these thoughtful comments – and honored to see Phil posting on Edgeryders for the first time!
What I learn here:
So, it seems to me you two are saying: if there is a sprint response to do here, authorities should focus on the testing itself. Tech, on the other hand, should be redirected to preparedness:
Based on this, I am going to revisit Result 2 on the writeup at the beginning of this thread.
Also, these are very large shoes to fill, but thank you anyway, Eireann:
Banging on the door of the NGI people at the Commission right now. 
Dare I say that if tech wants to make a contribution, a great way to do it, would be exploring the causal factors behind why minorities communities are being hit harder or perhaps not receiving the help required during this pandemic.
Also, it’s worth saying that while Covid-19 is hitting hard, there is a significant risk (usually estimated at around 20%) that this isn’t the ONLY pandemic we’ll face this century. Even if we don’t face more of them, there will be multiple rounds of this one, and the same preperations will help us.
So developing anti-racist, distributed, community built, pandemic response, really is something tech could get involved in…and still be very impactful. This could be the vision of a revamped OpenCare?
Eireann
Eireann, this a fantastic intuition. I have taken the liberty of adding it to the writeup. Thank you so much!
Would love to. Ping @markomanka!
https://www.crick.ac.uk/research/covid-19/covid19-consortium ← Open Data on COVID-19 testing.
Sarcasm follows:
Collecting data from citizens.
It is also great for tracking homosexuals. After all, homosexuality is considered a disease in many places.
Also, tracking abortions could be possible.
Tracking criminals, like environmental activists and writers of political texts.
All for the good cause.
Below, a link to how willingly some walk this path.
Right. Huge danger. If they do that in the USA, Trump and his gang would use data like that as a political weapon.
Meanwhile, the push for trackers is going full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes. Except there is a lot of disagreement on how to go about it. Centralized or decentralized data? And assuming that whatever approach gets taken, there will be some collateral damage. Support individual privacy over better tracking? Or the other way around? See:
And in South Korea, where containment has been relatively successful, they take a far more transparent approach, also full of deep tradeoffs:
From there:
Mere weeks after the initial flurry of articles pondering whether or not democracies were better equipped to deal with pandemics, few countries were getting away with not sacrificing some kinds of freedom. As Kim pointed out, the true question was which freedoms to prioritize. The chaos of the MERS outbreak had left the public with a grim conviction: sacrificing some individual privacy was simply the upfront cost of avoiding more debilitating consequences down the line.
South Koreans have decided that, during an infectious-disease outbreak, there is a strong, pragmatic case to be made in favor of what might be called virtuous surveillance—a radically transparent version of people-tracking that is subject to public scrutiny and paired with stringent legal safeguards against abuse. Despite its imperfections, South Korea’s policy is striking for the fact that it brings the mechanisms and outcomes of surveillance into the public forum. In doing so, it appeals to a deeper sense of civic trust—the belief that, in a crisis, the citizenry can be relied upon to play its part.
This of course is based on a high level of surveillance, “This is one of the benefits of having a universal health-care system,’ Eom told me, gesturing behind us. 'When they enter your personal identification number, they can review your travel history.”
afaik South Korea already is a total surveillance state…
So the classic tradeoff between privacy and security. Except so often, you lose the privacy for sure. But does that translate into better security?
- There are currently 43 contact tracing apps available globally
- India’s Aarogya Setu is the most popular, with 50 million downloads
- 28% of apps have no privacy policy
- 64% of apps use GPS rather than Bluetooth
Note:
hat tip: @napo
The situation is highly fluid. Over last weekend, the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) has collapsed over privacy concerns. Score one for the “non-solutionist” approach advocated in our call vs. the magic app.
