[SystemSafety] NHS COVID-19 Contact Tracing App

[Bruce Hunter]

 A bit more on the Australian status of contact tracing app COVIDsafe that
may be useful in this discussion.

Jeremy Rosen
> It should in fact be an additional tool in the contact tracing arsenal.


The Australian Department of Health considers COVIDsafe as an additional
tool to assist the manual tracking and an important part of taking measured
steps in the 3 stage restriction easing that has started this week. As of
the 10th of May Australia has a growth rate of 1.08 with 14 cases reported
out of 6,941 daily tests conducted (average 21 cases per day in past 7
days).

> It won't get every contact but will certainly get some.

There still is some issues on reliability of app on Iphone where it does
drop out and interferes with other Bluetooth apps. *This could increase
false-negative rates.*
Bluetooth contact , obviously, is not the same as transmission of the
virus. COVIDsafe will only log a contact if over 15 minutes (I assume this
is epidemiologically appropriate) but Bluetooth range is much larger that
the 1.5 metre social distancing which the government gives as the app
contact distance. Bluetooth specifications for minimum range (east
transmitter power of -20dBm and lowest sensitivity reception of -85dBm) is
2 to 4 metres outdoors but up to 15  metres indoors and through walls. *This
would increase the false-positive-rates. *It seems the app uses the default
Bluetooth configuration which would increase this rage further. Even with
these issues it may still be a benefit in addition to manual tracking
follow-up.

> In Australia we're at 5 million downloads in a population of 25 million
in a week. I hope it succeeds
.
This seems to have settled down and there have been no more updates to the
number of downloads. Unsure if it will reached the objective of 40%. There
is still some disquiet and mistrust about the privacy issues (not helped by
government misuse of data in the past and strong access laws). Loosing
trust can come back to bight you...

On the privacy front, the government has designed the app to meet an
independent Privacy Impact Analysis (PIA). This relies on the publication
of source code and enactment of additions to the privacy act which seem to
be appropriately strong. The Australian Digital Transformation Agency (DTA),
he developer, has just published the Source Code for Android and IOS with
details and GitHub access at: https://www.dta.gov.au/news/dta
-publicly-releases-covidsafe-application-source-code for anyone interested.
There is some analysis by independent security experts on GitHub as well.

I also hope it works and helps limit post-restriction outbreaks here.

Bruce Hunter

On Wed, 6 May 2020 at 23:43, Jeremy Rosen <jeremy.rosen7 at gmail.com> wrote:

> What are the costs of a national tracing app? I'd suggest that most
> developed countries can manage to pull data off tracing apps without any
> detrimental effect to their contact tracing resourcing. It should in fact
> be an additional tool in the contact tracing arsenal. It won't get every
> contact but will certainly get some.
>
> In any case the data's unlikely to exist yet for comprehensive analyses
> before trying it out. The current tracking app campaigns run in each
> country will be the dataset for future epidemics.
>
> In Australia we're at 5 million downloads in a population of 25 million in
> a week. I hope it succeeds.
>
> Regards,
> Jeremy Rosen
>
>
>
> 6 May 2020, 8:57 pm Pekka Pihlajasaari, <pekka at data.co.za> wrote:
>
>> 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
>> --
>> pekka at data.co.za        Data Abstraction (Pty) Ltd      +27 11 484 9664
>>
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