[SystemSafety] NHS COVID-19 Contact Tracing App

[Pekka Pihlajasaari]

While a ubiquitous implementation embedded as a mandatory component in a mobile phone may provide the desired outcome, hoping for this during a rapidly unfolding epidemic seems an opportunistic response by politicians and administrators who misjudged their initial response and are trying to recover.

Is this not time that epidemiologists determine the level of compliance required in a voluntary system to provide more than virtue signalling?

The public efforts to promote these technologies seem to contain no economic analysis of the costs and benefits of these approaches. The opportunity cost of withdrawing resources from traditional contact tracing (which is known to work) appears to receive no consideration.

Regards
Pekka Pihlajasaari
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pekka at data.co.za	Data Abstraction (Pty) Ltd	+27 11 484 9664