A Slashdotter's Take On a Way To Use Smartphones To Defeat the Coronavirus Pandemic 221
Longtime Slashdot reader dbart writes: With the near ubiquitous use of smartphones in America, it's sensible to seize upon this resource to help with the coronavirus pandemic. Here's my take on a way to use smartphones to deal with the pandemic:
America does not currently have a good coronavirus test -- but they are in development. Once a test is available there should be a smartphone app ready to deploy immediately. The app should work like this: A person would be tested for the virus at a testing station and the results of the test would be entered into the app's database. The person could then go about their business, such as going back to work. Upon arriving at the place of work, the person would bring up the app on their smartphone. The app would display some information to identify the subject that was tested along with a barcode. The employer would then scan in the barcode with the app on the employer's phone which will check with the central database and report back the results of their coronavirus test and the recency of the test. The employer would decide whether to allow the person into the workplace. This could similarly be used to safely allow entry to a restaurant, airplane, theater, sporting event, etc. -- thus getting the economy functioning again.
I've only presented a rough sketch of my idea about this above and there's many nuances to how this should work. It's obvious that everyone should be tested frequently for this to be effective. This would require testing on a massive scale, but considering the damage happening to the American economy, such massive testing could easily be justified. A capability as described above would get the American economy restarted at the soonest possible time and would allow society to function until a vaccine is available. It would also be a very valuable asset to epidemiological investigators. If an app was designed with enough forethought it could be deployed internationally. I'm hoping to get not just a Slashdot conversation but a larger conversation started about the use of technology to defeat this virus. Perhaps there's a Slashdotter with the skillsets to make this happen who would like to take this on. If anyone has a contact at the CDC please forward this post to them to insure that technological solutions such as this are being considered.
America does not currently have a good coronavirus test -- but they are in development. Once a test is available there should be a smartphone app ready to deploy immediately. The app should work like this: A person would be tested for the virus at a testing station and the results of the test would be entered into the app's database. The person could then go about their business, such as going back to work. Upon arriving at the place of work, the person would bring up the app on their smartphone. The app would display some information to identify the subject that was tested along with a barcode. The employer would then scan in the barcode with the app on the employer's phone which will check with the central database and report back the results of their coronavirus test and the recency of the test. The employer would decide whether to allow the person into the workplace. This could similarly be used to safely allow entry to a restaurant, airplane, theater, sporting event, etc. -- thus getting the economy functioning again.
I've only presented a rough sketch of my idea about this above and there's many nuances to how this should work. It's obvious that everyone should be tested frequently for this to be effective. This would require testing on a massive scale, but considering the damage happening to the American economy, such massive testing could easily be justified. A capability as described above would get the American economy restarted at the soonest possible time and would allow society to function until a vaccine is available. It would also be a very valuable asset to epidemiological investigators. If an app was designed with enough forethought it could be deployed internationally. I'm hoping to get not just a Slashdot conversation but a larger conversation started about the use of technology to defeat this virus. Perhaps there's a Slashdotter with the skillsets to make this happen who would like to take this on. If anyone has a contact at the CDC please forward this post to them to insure that technological solutions such as this are being considered.
That should work as well as the Iowa caucus (Score:4, Funny)
Just test the people and staple an RFID tag to their ear like any other livestock. Or some kind of ankle bracelet. That'll work just fine. Tell the privacy weenies to take a hike!
Yeah um - paper. Paper is the app (Score:5, Insightful)
The app doesn't add much, if anything, over showing your boss the paper test result. Anononimity? Your boss already knows your name. What the app is put you in a huge database that will leak.
Re:Yeah um - paper. Paper is the app (Score:4, Interesting)
The app doesn't add much, if anything
Yep. OP is really overthinking this. All the smartphone is doing is displaying a piece of information, a simple piece of paper handed out at the testing station would do the same job.
If you're going to do "smartphone" then use it to track everybody's movements so you have a complete database of who was near who, and when. If somebody tests positive then it can automatically warn other people in the chain to surrender themselves for quarantine.
Such an app would be very useful for law enforcement, too and I'm sure parents would love to have the ability it to see who's been hanging around near their children.
It's win-win.
Re:That should work as well as the Iowa caucus (Score:5, Interesting)
You know why Korea has clamped down on it? They are tracking all phones in real time and running big data queries on the location dumps to get all the people close to the one infected. They can do that because most of NEC and Samsung 4G network core stuff scales nearly horizontally and runs on generic compute, so all they needed to do was to pile up some servers in the rack
Further to this, Google and Facebook are having "interesting discussions" to do the same with USA. Israel is also doing the same and Russia has quite openly declared that they are doing it where they can.
Source (one of Lebedev's rags so this may end up being reprinted in English in the next few days in the Indy): https://novayagazeta.ru/articl... [novayagazeta.ru]
Re:That should work as well as the Iowa caucus (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, first thing I thought when I read this is tattoos are much more traditional.
Don't need recharging and you really always have them with you.
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Yeah, first thing I thought when I read this is tattoos are much more traditional.
These days we can even do scannable QR codes. I see no reason every citizen shouldn't have one.
Unclear to me how this would work (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you can clarify, but I think there are several problems with your approach as I currently understand it. Both of the main problems relate to knowing when to test. It seems pretty clear that there are some people who are contagious well before they show any symptoms, so they are unlikely to get tested. The worse problem is that there seem to be some people who always remain symptom-free, but can act as super-spreaders. Again, it seems unlikely they'll get tested until it's too late...
I think a better solution approach might involve compartmentalizing society into smaller groups. If each of us is only exposed to a limited number of other people, then outbreaks can be limited. The way the Chinese succeeded in corralling the virus was by applying this approach both before and after cases were detected...
Hmm... What if your smartphone app just kept track of all the people you had been exposed to so the infection threads could be unraveled?
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Compartmentalizing is also exactly how spies and terrorists survive the scrutiny of investigation. Think of your life and those who you love as under threat of contamination with every connection. Live like a spy. Minimize your contacts.
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And the point of staying home is that we expect to find a way to treat or prevent it. That research takes time. Time that the people who expose themselves and die probably would have wanted everyone, themselves included, to just hunker down.
Some people seem worried about rich peopl
Malaria doesn't actually kill many Americans (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a few problems with your spiel.
First, the premise that everybody is going to get it, so we should just get it over with. In fact, it's now looking pretty certain that a couple of common (and cheap) drugs used for malaria can prevent and cure this infection. We didn't know that two weeks ago. By slowing down the spread, we bought time to make that discovery. The medicine is easy to make, so in another two to three weeks, we can have tons of it available and we pretty much out an end to this with very few people getting sick.
That's aside from your jealousy-driven need to try to turn absolutely everything into class warfare. With all the time you spend on that, you could instead spend that time taking aome classes from WGU and two or three years from now you'd be rich people.
Of course, in all likelihood you already ARE among the top 8% richest people in the entire world, but you're the type who would obessessed with whining about your neighbor's Ferrari if you were driving a Porsche.
Re: Malaria doesn't actually kill many Americans (Score:2)
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several different trials are being made around the world with existing meds.
e.g. one in catalonia is trying the following: reducing the amount of virus shed by infected people (treating them with antiretrovirals / protease inhibitors) and at the same time improve the resistance to infection of their contacts (with hydroxychloroquin, already used for malaria). what this could potentially do is help in reducing both the spread and the intensity of each infection, causing milder symptoms, and also protect heal
Spoiled 1 percenters (Score:2)
Btw to be in the top 1% highest incomes in the entire world, you'd need an annual income of of $32,400.
You're almost surely in the top 2-3%, but you're a spoiled brat.
If you're only in the top 2% and you want to be in the top 1% or top 0.5%, I got into the top 0.5% by first taking classes at WGU.edu. That's your next stop, WGU. Or be grateful you're in the top 2%. Or you can just decide to keep being a spoiled brat and the rest of us can look at you with disdain for choosing envy as the way of life for y
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OMG, how did we ever handle infectious diseases in The Days Before Smartphones?
Re:Unclear to me how this would work (Score:5, Informative)
Its not merelysome people; although there was plenty of disease spread by people with symptoms such as South Korea - Patient 31 [reuters.com] ... who spread it to thousands of people, when it had previously been contained; Anyways, its All people who get the virus who can spread it before symptoms appear.
And originally being estimated that 25% of infections come from people with no symptons.
That percentage of transmission by asymptomatic individuals is probably increasing due to awareness of the virus and people that have symptoms doing self-quarantine thus being less likely to spread.
After someone is exposed to the virus, there is likely 1 to 2 days between exposure and infection, and then thee is an Incubation period Median 5.5 days up to 14 days before symptoms start to appear.
People can still spread the virus during most of the incubation period.
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Hmm... I feel like I'm completely out of context here... My comment was actually submitted as encouragement and request for clarification before the story was published. I was responding to the request to help select the next Slashdot story, but I don't feel so helpful now.
As regards your [mysidia's] clarification, yes, but... We don't really seem to know anything that clearly about this coronavirus. I was deliberately trying to be fuzzy with the "some people".
However my main concern was with how this smart
Incubation or two stages of infection? (Score:2)
One aspect I forgot, but it calls for a different Subject anyway.
As I understand things (probably from that article in the Atlantic?), I don't think it should be described in terms of incubation, but more as a two-stage process. During the first stage it is concentrated in the upper respiratory tract and is contagious, but the symptoms are relatively mild. It's in the second stage when it moves into the lower respiratory tract that the more severe and life-threatening symptoms appear. The time between these
Totalitarian system (Score:2)
This proposal cannot work in a freedom-based society. You need a totalitarianism for that to work. Which is the only option in the next 3 months anyway, and this is why China is sucessful.
The employer or restaurant cannot decide who to let in because their best interest is not the health of people, but the short-term continuation of their business.
The decider has to be someone who has the best interest is to stop the spread of the virus, i.e. health officials or such.
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Your comment doesn't seem to be logically consistent. Please clarify or focus.
That's working in China (Score:5, Informative)
That's what China has been doing, and that's one of the main reasons they've successfully reduced the number of new cases. Testing, contact tracing, and quarantining - that's what works.
Re:That's working in China (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what China has been doing, and that's one of the main reasons they've successfully reduced the number of new cases. Testing, contact tracing, and quarantining - that's what works.
I've heard the same, using QR codes to check into restarants, shopping centres. That's how communism works tracking everyone's movements, who they've seen, the groups they mingle with, where they went, how long they were there for, who else happened to be there. It would be remiss for us not to consider the possibility that China is not only tracking it's citizens movements, but employing whatever AI technology they have at it's disposal to analyse and control the behavior of the virus through the population.
It just so happens that the technology of convenience we use everyday happens to be Stalin and the Stazi's wet dream come true. IIRC we discussed China's AI camera arrays [huffingtonpost.com.au] are capable of deciphering someone's mood. We have capabilities today only dreamed of by those regimes so why wouldn't China utilize that capability to it's fullest extent?
Obviously the west can do the same thing and now we have a situation where the, already intrusive, western state has an excuse to do so, for our own good because it can only work if we all participate. So the question is, how are we to do that and maintain the last vestiges of freedom of association, which is equally as important as freedom of speech before, during and after the human population has adapted?
That's not communism (Score:3)
China just copying US porn industry (Score:2)
That's what China has been doing, and that's one of the main reasons they've successfully reduced the number of new cases. Testing, contact tracing, and quarantining - that's what works.
China is just copying the US porn industry. As in so many previous cases, the US porn industry leads technological development. The process the "app author" describes is pretty much what the porn industry does regarding AIDS.
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Testing, contact tracing and quarantining, absolutely. Not this asinine employer scanning barcodes stuff.
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We can look to China to see some of the potential problems with using an app too.
Flat battery? Lost your phone? Can't afford a phone? Previously it was just hard to pay for stuff using cash, but now you can't even get into the supermarket.
There will be people too scared to get tested too, e.g. immigrants (legal or otherwise) who are worried that they might be arrested or harassed at the test centre. Ireland has firewalled its immigration system from its health services for this reason, with guarantees that
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There are many factors reducing its spread. It's not reasonable to attribute it primarily to a smart phone app when large gatherings are forbidden and many in public work are wearing gloves, or even masks, and engaging in far more handwashing.
Ah, the high-tech solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Alternatively, no app, no testing, no technology of any kind.
Just stay home for a month.
Curb-side delivery of very basic food. Better yet, one big delivery of flour/cereal/lentils/rice/eggs -- things that easily last for months.
No money, no payments, no interest.
Big pause button.
Today it's March 20th. A month from now, it can be March 21st. One month of economical stand-still. Then it's over.
Just for fun, we'll do it again six months later, just to be sure.
I'd be happy to do it for one month every year forever. The big human cleansing project. Life slows by ~8%. A month of planned family time. Everyone catches up on sleep. Every communicable virus just dies out every April. Done.
Absolutely no technology required. Easily enforced culturally, and we don't even need 100% compliance -- I'm sure 95% would already be plenty good enough.
We'd need a name for it. One that even school children could understand. How about we call it hibernation.
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Better yet, one big delivery of flour/cereal/lentils/rice/eggs -- things that easily last for months.
There are eggs that last for months?
Apart form that I do agree with your points. As most cases are asymptomatic (recent estimates go as high as 90%) unless you can test basically everybody, people need to stay at home, reduce shopping to the essential minimum and keep their distance. China has managed to keep the peak to 100k, in a city of 11M and reports no new infections. So apparently stopping this is possible.
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Put them in the fridge. They last pretty much forever.
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I buy fresh eggs from the chicken coop. They have no trouble lasting six months in the fridge. After about three-months, they look like the grocery-store eggs.
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What's the source of the 90% rates? Largest I'm seeing (from reputable sources, i.e. epidemiological journals) is around 40% asymptomatic.
It's definitely stoppable without technological means, and without later widescale testing. It just requires shut downs at the largest increase of symptomatic rate to keep it low enough for healthcare to deal with, then reduce the R0 by relative isolation (minimum of social distancing, plus some quarantine measures, with large social distancing for the 70+ age populatio
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yes, eggs can last almost a month.
you got the egg from the store, you wash it, let it dry at room temp.
clean egg is coated with petroleum jelly, store in a cool dry place.
last 20 days easy and maybe 30.
Also you can hard boil the eggs and that's another form of keeping them
healthy.
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Petroleum jelly? Do you _insist_ on having people drop eggs and getting petroleum jelly into your cooking when you handle them?
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There are eggs that last for months?
An unwashed Egg will last for 3 weeks unrefrigerated.
Fresh eggs can be preserved for as long as a year by keeping the eggs in mineral oil.
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An unwashed Egg will last for 3 weeks unrefrigerated.
No, 6 month to 12 month, sometimes longer.
Fresh eggs can be preserved for as long as a year by keeping the eggs in mineral oil. ... and they would last probably decades.
Every oil would do
In the US it is difficult to get "fresh" eggs. Eggs are frozen and then sold after thawing. Some idiot thought that would kill the germs on it and preserve it longer, the opposite is the case.
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>> There are eggs that last for months?
Yes. Industrial eggs are washed in US, and this reduces their shelf time by a factor of 10.
In europe we dont wash, and they last forever in the fridge.
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> There are eggs that last for months?
Yes. They're powdered. The same is true for milk. Canned meat has a shelf life of roughly one year.
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There are eggs that last for months?
Outside of the US, yes.
Eggs last pretty long, half a year if the air is not to dry is easy, with cooling even longer.
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About 3 months is the infection curve. Then about 2 years of suppression to achieve herd immunity, assuming no large mutation rate.
The 1 month is approximately now until peak. Peak is most likely to be the overwhelming of the health services, and maximum rate of fatalities.
If there's no large mutation rate, then we'll probably have this done and dusted in about 18-24 months.
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Agreed. I'm locked down to wait it out.
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want to see how easy human greed is, let's trade eggs for weed or alcohol. yep You'll die most likely without the egg's or have issues over time. Darwinism
Re:Ah, the high-tech solution (Score:5, Funny)
want to see how easy human greed is, let's trade eggs for weed or alcohol. yep You'll die most likely without the egg's or have issues over time. Darwinism
How much weed or alcohol are you trading for an egg? I might be interested. I've got months of grains+lentils stored up, you can have my eggs if I can have your weed. I'll need it if I'm going to live on rice+lentils for 3 months.
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A much better approach is to follow the example of South Korea and Japan. Early response, thorough testing, quarantine of the carriers, masks for everyone, and life goes on. No need for apps, no need for lockdowns, curfews, and other panic measures. No thousands of corpses.
But that requires a scientific approach, a working universal health system and a bit of preparedness.
Things which "reek of soshulism", which is contrary to the preferred policy of no taxes, corrupt government, trickle-down, and borrow-n
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They have been doing that in China. The hospital calls you once a day to check on your health and make sure you are isolating if required. The local community manager delivers groceries to your house.
HIPAA? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is private medical data.
I suspect that there are a lot of issues relating to HIPAA compliance that the idea glosses over.
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HIPAA Only requires professional medical providers and insurance companies to keep information private;
so called "covered entities", and their subcontractors who sign a BAA.
And Nobody else has to follow HIPAA rules.
HIPAA also does not mean the provider cannot distribute the information With explicit Consent of the patient, so if the Patient consents to putting their test data in a public database, then it can happen.
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Without changing the law this would be illegal unless you had each person who installed the app give specific permission. And there is no way you could get the pervasive permission and app usage needed to make it effective. (And god help us giving that level of surveillance to any outside agency.)
The OP's idea of a testing based regime will be ready to roll out after the peak of this is done. The only goal at this point is to slow this to keep from overwhelming the healthcare system and until e
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Couple other things: this plan doesn't make any sense for testing for the virus, but it does make some degree of sense for verifying people who have been vaccinated. That doesn't require an app, just an ID
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HIPAA interacts with the Ameericans with Disabilities Act, and various other laws. Employers are not permitted to _ask_ many forms of question, or to discriminate on the basis of them.
the app you are looking for is called an antibody (Score:5, Insightful)
Only testing for the virus is stupid, you'll just get stuck in a spin-cycle of endless testing until someone catches it and self-quarantines, maybe before they spread it, maybe not. Instead, test for the virus as well as the antibodies to the virus. Google United Biomedical for one such test that's already available. If someone is asymptomatic and they have antibodies, then they've already recovered. No quarantine necessary, please go back to work, go shopping, to the gym, etc. Carry your test results with you when out in public, or enter it into a database. Throw in some blockchain to make it trendy. If you don't have antibodies and you don't have the virus, then get offered a nice fat financial incentive to be given the virus and quarantine with a bit of government assistance for a few weeks, or, if old and with underlying health conditions, then just quarantine until a vaccine is ready with assistance. If you are young and healthy and you refuse to be given the virus and choose quarantine until vaccinated, fine, minimal assistance and a guard will be checking on your quarantine compliance. Your grandparents will thank you.
Or, we can do nothing, sample poorly and generate garbage data, then act out of fear and panic. Yeah, I'm sure this plan will be so productive. Not.
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No medical professional can ethically infect anybody with a novel virus. The risk of injury and death is too high.
"I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm" is part of the Hippocratic oath. Makes sense then, makes sense now.
By the way, I am aware that there are studies that do infect people with certain, non-novel viruses but those are very, very strictly controlled and reviewed very, very carefully.
A small hole... (Score:2)
And waiting for a vaccine isn't going to happen this year. Maybe you will see it starting next year. Maybe.
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And worse, for COVID-19, that's after you're contagious, but potentially before you start showing symptoms. If you test positive for antibodies, you need to go through at least a two week quarantine, and be tested regularly for viral shedding. Once you have shown no shedding for two weeks straight, then and only then should you be cleared to do whatever.
100% compliance is not going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, if 100% of the people
- got tested
- had a current test
- hadn't had infection between test and now (currently 5-7 business days)
- and everyone could show this
Then yes, that would enable restaurants, stores, etc. to serve people.
Every one of those assumptions above are false.
- not everybody gets tests (they won't allow you a test unless you've come into contact with someone infected even with a prescription)
- not everybody has a "current" test (NBA players aside)
- It still takes 5-7 business days to get a result during which time you CAN get infected but get back a clean bill of health
- some people (like me) aren't interested in sharing our entire health history, date of birth, passport, etc., just to get some pizza
Great idea. For NAZI GERMANY.*
E
*Godwin's law
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Why Nazi Germany? Not far off what China is currently doing (and Mao would have loved to do). And China has proved that it's actually pretty damn effective.
You're assuming people are honest (Score:5, Insightful)
The eastern cultures (China, Japan, Korea) will have less problems with this. The latent Confucianism pounded into their heads since childhood stresses the importance of the larger group over the individual. So people there are more willing to make personal sacrifices for the benefit of family, neighborhood, company, country. Western cultures OTOH tend to value individuality more. Nothing wrong per se with this (and it's arguably superior since it's more resistant to authoritarianism), but it does result in a higher incidence of people who will refuse to comply with or even actively subvert these epidemic-related movement restrictions. So just because it helped in China doesn't necessarily mean it'll help in the West.
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And the system works so well that they'll extend it to Tetnus, Mumps, Rubella, Flue, etc. shots.
Isn't this a fine way to mandate that everyone get vaccinated with the "sauce du-jour of the month"?
Sorry, comrade, you cannot come to work because you haven't had your weekly ______ injection.
As someone else said, some won't care, or don't have a job whose mandates must be adhered to.
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they will actively work to hack your system so that their phone will say they've recovered....
This is why we have Laws and prisons to deter such types of misbehaviors.
At the very least it is a Fraud to falsify a test result, and the person will be Liable for All the economic damages that result from their fraud, including the costs of medical expenses from anyone they infect knowingly or unknowingly while committing the fraud.
Also, it would be good to have the Criminal codes updated so that attempting
Re:You're assuming people are honest (Score:5, Interesting)
Western cultures OTOH tend to value individuality more. Nothing wrong per se with this (and it's arguably superior since it's more resistant to authoritarianism),
Individuality was taught to us by the advertising industry, largely as the work of Edward Bernays [wikipedia.org] so that we would be more emotional consumers and our buying habits could therefore be manipulated.
Prior to this advertising was factually oriented around specifications, uses or benefits and purchasers had a more pragmatic mindset to how they would spend their money. I think that, whilst more powerful, modern society seems to value naive vapidity over the realistic and pragmatic concerns.
Even the corporation was different and had to operate within a specific charter, as opposed to the way modern multi-national corporations function today. Emotional consumers are far easier to control than stoic people that westerners *used* to be.
but it does result in a higher incidence of people who will refuse to comply with or even actively subvert these epidemic-related movement restrictions.
I think we're at this juncture we meet the opposing ideals of Communism and Capitalism, control of an individual person. It seems that communism is always attempting to convert capitalism to the feudalism it is destined to become, by denying peoples individual freedoms and tracking their every move.
Democratic society is always trying to temper the forces of unfettered capitalism that make it grow with the freedom required to eternally re-new and stabilize it. These are *exactly* the circumstances when the powerful seek more power, that's why they say "Never waste a good crisis" and take the opportunity to seize individual freedoms based on exactly those reasons.
This is how the state gains power over the individual who "refuses to comply". I think the more stoic westerners are, the more aware of this paradox they become and their value system, itself, shuns the un-ethical, criminal and, power seeking behaviors that emotionally dis-regulated people seem to prize over stable, free society.
Fail. Isolate immediately! (Score:5, Insightful)
A person would be tested for the virus at a testing station and the results of the test would be entered into the app's database. The person could then go about their business, such as going back to work.
Fail. No, no, no. If a person was suspected of infection and was tested, they should be isolated until the result came out negative.
Unless you are doing random testing (which is a waste of test kits), then people being tested were done so for a reason, basically there would be indication of the virus infection such as fever, cough, etc. They should be isolated to stop the spread until the result came out.
It seemed most Americans still do not understand the reason for the testing the virus. Dude, a suspected infection was not tested because so they know how to treat you (although it may be a side effect), or to update the official numbers. People were tested so the authorities know if they need to back-trace and test all their close contacts in the past 14 days, to find any more infected before they show symptoms, to help stop the virus from spreading further!
China did that by having test results available in 4 hours while keeping the suspected patient waiting in isolation. If the result came out positive, the patient is immediately moved into hospital. Yeah, that got them criticised for separating families. Perhaps it is better for their families to also get infected, huh?
If you let the guy go about their business, then you just let more people to get infected!
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Fail. No, no, no. If a person was suspected of infection and was tested, they should be isolated until the result came out negative.
+1 *THIS*, if anyone even suspects they might have this gods-be-damned virus, they should self-quarrantine until they get the all-clear!
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That's been the message in the UK for a while now. The Government here has stepped in and offered to help companies fund the extra expected sick pay of this.
The rationale is that this will keep the spread to a workable level, so the loss of money in the short term will be more than made up by the resilience to the long term tax returns and return to productivity by not damaging the human/corporate infrastructure more than is absolutely necessary.
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hey, you got the source material for
>>China did that by having test results available in 4 hours while keeping the suspected patient waiting in isolation. If the result came out positive, the patient is immediately moved into hospital.
I would like that to factual, because my data is so off, using europe's data, that what you are talking about proves a full possible reason to my hypothesis.
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I heard that from a US news interview with someone explaining how China dealt with the epidemic, in particular that China has local test labs near special hospitals where patients go for testing so the results can come back in 4 hours.
A bit of Google-fu found this, which matched with the above description: "The RT-PCR kit can produce results in three hours as soon as samples are delivered to the lab"
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/... [chinadaily.com.cn]
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Found the source, the interview is by NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0... [nytimes.com]
The swab was for a PCR test, right? How fast could they do that? Until recently, we were sending all of ours to Atlanta.
They got it down to four hours.
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Stop right there. Random testing is actually the only way to really get a handle on what's going on. We absolutely should randomly test about 17,000 people around the Bay Area. That will tell us, to within about 1% CI at p < .01, what percentage of people actually have this bug. Combine that with the CFR, and you'll have a much, much better idea of how dangerous this virus actually is. If 3 million people already have it (unlikel
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Random testing is actually the only way to really get a handle on what's going on.
No, the priority is stopping the spread of the virus.
This is not an experiment where you want to know what's really going on, this is an epidemic that you want to put out asap.
With limited number of test kits, back tracing infected people to test those who had close contact to catch them asap is the best use of the test kits. Even if (a big if) there are spare test kits remaining from testing back traced contacts, it still does not make sense to do random testing -- the percentage of population infected is
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>> back tracing infected people to test those who had close contact
This strategy only works at the very beginning of an infection, when you have 1-2 cases per million people.
After that, its hopeless, and not used any more in any of the countries.
Random sample testing is in fact really useful from a strategic point of view to get the real infection numbers.
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Fail. No, no, no. If a person was suspected of infection and was tested, they should be isolated until the result came out negative. ...
That is how it is done in Germany
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Is the four hour test not available for purchase from China, or is the CDC too chicken to use it? (It's not like it wasn't effective, we've already seen the results...)
See my Google-fu: https://www.factcheck.org/2020... [factcheck.org]
“To our knowledge, no discussions occurred between WHO and CDC (or other USG agencies) about WHO providing COVID-19 tests to the US,” WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic told us in an emailed statement. “This is consistent with experience since the US does not ordinarily rely on WHO for reagents or diagnostic tests because of sufficient domestic capacity.”
Seems like NIH syndrome.
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The CDC fucked up testing in this case.
"Papers, please" (Score:3, Insightful)
It is the first step to a "papers, please" society where you need the government's permission to travel, enter certain buildings, have certain jobs, vote, own a car or house, marry certain people and so on.
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It is the first step to a "papers, please" society where you need the government's permission to travel
"Papers, please" is Not about some kind of Dystopian world -- that's our world.
In that game, you are literally playing the role of the immigration officer at a Border-Crossing Checkpoint,
and in some cases the rules for crossing a border will be very restrictive, so that game is rathe very realistic...
In fact every Country in our world today basically has has those checkpoints for anyone wanting to ente
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>> you need the government's permission to travel, enter certain buildings
What do you think the next 6 months will look like ?
Several problems (Score:5, Informative)
1. Not everyone has a smartphone
2. This would be open to fakery
3. The government has never been good at app security
well after being out work for a time you get an fr (Score:2)
well after being out work for a time you get an free phone + free plan (But then it may good to not work and stay on the medicaid)
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I can also see employers taking advantage of this.
Tested positive - "Go home and you can come back when cured...or until I find someone else. I'm not willing to wait."
Waiting for results = "Lowering you down to part-time just to be sure...and cancelling your full-time benefits"
Haven't tested yet = "I can't discuss what I talked about with other employees but I'm require you to get tested...because I need an excuse to lower you to part-time."
Why not just cure it? (Score:2)
Why not just cure anyone who tests positive for the virus by taking them out behind the barn and shooting them in the head, then burning the body? This has the advantage of conferring 100% perfect immunity against *every* conceivable bacterial or viral infection and will lower the rates of death caused by old age, smoking, traffic accidents, wars, or any other cause. It will also prevent the infected person from spreading the virus further.
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OK, we'll start with you, youre seriously ill.
Bring on the one world currency (Score:2)
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Mark of the beast. But will they do jail people? Hell the jails are working to get people out to cut down the population
Sounds like what porn industry does for AIDS (Score:2)
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Debbie Does Diagnosis?
Next time, just don’t (Score:2)
Heart in the right place, bad solution (Score:5, Insightful)
You're getting too ahead of yourself (Score:2)
And it's not just that. The testing can be br
TraceTogether (Score:2)
The Singapore Government just released this app for community-driven contact tracing. Doesn't record personal or geolocation data, and complements existing contact tracing efforts. Providing it as a possible reference: TraceTogether [tracetogether.gov.sg]
Re:TraceTogether (Score:5, Informative)
Cloudfront ... an adware malware network.
Is there a download link for the apk on that website??
I didn't think so ...
It's not a data problem (Score:2)
The bottleneck isn't reporting results. It's actually getting results. This seems like a classic "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" post. Unfortunately, the proper hammer is not IT. It's biotech. Once we have an actual test, you just go home when you get a positive. There's no need for any app to do that.
Illegal? (Score:2)
Pretty sure employers are prohibited from requiring medical data. So there's that.
Stupid (Score:2)
So they assume it would work like in the porn business.
Everybody shows a test before the shoot and still after a few months everybody has Aids.
Next day? (Score:2)
And what if they get the virus from someone the next day?
Better idea, quarantine everybody who can be quarantined until we can test everybody. Reduce quarantine levels once we know to a good degree who is infected and who isn't.
If anybody then becomes infected - quarantine them and everybody they have met in the last week.
This is pretty much what they're doing in S Korea and it's working pretty well, they do get 100ish new cases every day but the number has been holding steady for now rather than rocketing
Vaccine trails & concurrent production indemni (Score:2)
I've heard it said that vaccine trials last stage takes about a year and then production then also takes a similar amount of time.
Vaccine companies should all start producing the vaccines right now if they keep for long enough (IDK about shelf life). I don't think many people would be objecting right now about world governments agreeing to indemnify these companies against loses in case the vaccines don't work. This way the trails and the vaccine production could run concurrently instead of waiting for tria
Hippa (Score:2)
Police-state vs personal choice (Score:2)
Skimmed. The submitter's top-level goal appears to be "get the economy moving again", which is worthwhile. But, the submitters approach is premised on excluding infected people from accessing work/restaurants/etc, which shifts society into combative gatekeepers (the smartphone angle seems tangential; "papers, please" is fundamentally what's proposed).
I think something like this [slashdot.org] is more sensible, which boils down to:
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... to have every smartphone install an app ...
How?? How are you gonna make me install such an apk??
I am outside apple's walled garden. I am outside google's walled garden.
mass surveillance (Score:2)
Theres no point in an app if you can do mass surveillance instead to track the contacts.
An app is opt-out. Mass surveillance not really.
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