Japan’s COVID-19 contact-tracing app hasn't warned users of encounters with carriers since September Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has admitted that the Android version of its COVID-19 contact-tracing app has not informed users of contact with virus carriers since September 2020. As Japan has recently experienced a third wave of infections, news of that failure is a significant error and embarrassment. The …
It is my impression that the problem was recalcitrant state governments. It was clear to everone that Germany should have locked down mid October. Instead they waited and waited until one week before the schools would close for christmas vacation anyway, and then they told people that they were allowed to meet for Christmas and new year. The result was that people took liberties (..I am only seeing one group of family members at a time.. ..Wheher I go shopping at home or go shopping at my vacation home 800 km away makes no difference..), and here we are. Still not as bad off as the UK, but a horrorshow nevertheless. And Mrs. Merkel, whom the Brexiteers have accused of running the EU, could not even push through a timely lockdown.
Whut? No, it was Japan. We Brits wouldn't lose face by admitting to errors!
But seriously, Japanese people in cities are used to wearing face masks against pollution and I think are more likely to follow Government guidelines. Let's hope their good run continues.
I was going to suggest that maybe they had outsourced the app to Dido queen of chaos, but the fact that they have apologised made me realise that could never be the case.
It looks like a few lessons could be learnt by the UK gov from how to handle actions which don't live up to expectations. People soon get disillusioned by too much hype.
Sociologists refer to cultures such as Japan's as being 'tight' - rule-abiding, culturally homogenous, community focused. Such cultures correlate with - and are suited to dealing - external threats such as likelihood of natural disasters or belligerent neighbours. On the flip side, 'loose' cultures which are more individualistic and diverse can be drivers of economic drivers.
'World-beating' was the term the UK government used for their mate's tracing app - the one that didn't work. It's a different beast to the one currently deployed, which is built atop a joint Google and Apple effort.
Still, for some reason the current app won't work without 'location' turned on, and since this canes my phone's battery, I usually have location turned off. This is daft, because the core of the Google Apple system is Bluetooth proximity based, generating and storing tokens - location isn't needed for this to work.
IIRC, it was with Android 6 that Google introduced the need for location to be turned on for Bluetooth scanning - with the excuse that it speeds up pairing and it can phone home the location and then lookup what are the other devices it knows of in the locale. All for the benefit of humankind.
"if it meant getting the same infection and death rates!"
I'd like to see some studies that look into if the apps are in any way useful. If everybody is being tracked all of the time, patient zero could be really easy to find, but past a certain point, the tracking can be less useful for it's stated purpose and more useful for things we'd rather governments weren't doing.
"This post has been deleted by a moderator"
then the moderator should also delete the Wikipedia entry to the Diamond Princess, that's where I got my numbers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_Princess#Deaths
- 3711 crew and passengers
- 712 infected
- 14 dead, most of them over 70
And this article is about Japan and Covid-19, not about the UK and some new strain which might or might-not be the same virus. Icon, because this post might contain hard scientific data.
I knew people under 60 who have died leaving young children.
I know a man of 62 who has been in intesive care for over a month, he is unable to breathe without a ventilator and is still improving one day, getting worse again the following day. He is a former athlete and was in good condition when he caught the virus.
I also know a man in his early 60s who had the virus during summer 2020. He is still struggling to breathe and can't return to his job as a lorry driver.
Tell me again how it only kills the old and infirm.
I am trying to get fitter, particularly my cardio-vascular health, by jogging several days a week as I assume this is the most effective preparation I can make if I get Covid-19. (I have mild, well-controlled asthma and am 60). So worrying that a former athlete is in such a poor way (bets wishes to him BTW).
Any suggestions for better preparation gratefully received.
While maintaining fitness is a great thing to do, I’m not sure there’s really much you can do to prepare, since COVID seems to affect people to such wildly different extents regardless of their apparent condition when they acquire it.
Continue to work on avoidance, would be my suggestion - masks, distancing, hand sanitizer and all that. They’ve kept you away from it so far, long may it continue!
Thanks, hoopsa, I am looking forward to getting my first vaccine jab by May.
It would certainly help if other people did not stop and and chat across the entire width of the footpath when I'm out jogging or shopping (as this morning). Or did not see me walking along the pavement and then walk directly towards me totally ignoring the 2 metre distance rule. Still, maybe I'm being too much of a sensitive snowflake.
All the best, and I hope all el Reg readers and commentards, get through this without sever illness.
In my experience, having recently had "mild*" Covid-19, logging into the app and updating ones corona-status is about the very last thing one wants to waste any effort on! The energy just isn't there!!
*) The medical defintion of "mild" is different from the common understanding of the word: "Ok, so you have some trouble breathing?, Yes!, "But, can you walk?", what do you mean, walk, "go to the toilet, get some water, can you do that?" Yes, with difficulty. "OK, call us back when you cant!, have a nice day, sir!".
IMO those apps – unless they're mandatory – have the inherent problem that the only people likely to install them are those who tend to follow health authorities' guidance (mask, distancing, avoiding crowds and enclosed spaces with poor ventilation...) and so are not getting the disease in the first place.
It's those thinking "COVID is no big deal" and going about their lives and usual that end up getting infected, and then it's too late to install the app; wonderful tech as smartphones are, they cannot go back in time to collect the Bluetooth IDs from the phones of all the people they interacted with in the week or so that the owner was pre-symptomatic (but still contagious)...
> Is there any proof that contact tracing apps are useful in whatever country they are deployed?
You shouldn't be be looking for 'proof', but for 'evidence that strongly suggests that...'. There are too many variables between countries for proof.
Technology-based contact tracing alone is not a silver bullet, but it can be a very useful part of a wider, coordinated contact tracing effort, an effort that includes more old-scool techniques such as knocking on doors and asking questions. See recent issues of Private Eye for what a balls-up the UKs wider contact tracing effort has been. The issue goes back about a decade and the cut in funding to local health authorities meaning the local knowledge isn't on hand.
Even without an app, mobile phones give good population-level data to epidemiologists and policy makers - such as: How many people flee Paris for the country after restrictions are announced.
After she has been shielding for almost a year my wife came with me to be tested, the following day she reported positive I reported negative. Our mobiles had rarely been less than 6 feet apart for months, yet mine failed to register any sign of an issue even after my wife updated her status. It was only AFTER a contact tracer rang an hour or two following her change of status, to trace her contacts that I then received a message on my mobile.
So, contact tracing works, if only to tell me what I knew, but the application did next to nothing. Oh, it does one thing, it falls asleep and has to be reloaded.
I have an iPhone 7 and the Scottish contact app. iOS lets me view a log which shows when it's downloaded a list of exposure notifications, and that is about 5 times in 24 hours. So I suppose that if a contact reports a positive test in their app, then my app tells me that up to 5 hours later. Their app doesn't meanwhile shout out "Unclean, unclean" every sixty seconds, because if they do what they should then they should be self isolated, and if they aren't, then they probably leave their phone behind anyway.
And look what just happened with isolation and contact tracing over the much, much smaller tennis tournament. The young, fit and healthy, no matter the warnings, will break the rules and assume "it won't happen to me". Most athletes are young, fit and healthy so likely there will be a higher proportion who will abuse or ignore the rules than in the more general population.
Just look at the numbers of raves or student house parties being broke up and people fined.
(Clearly it's not all younger people, just that there is a larger proportion of "unbelievers" in that age group.)
TV drivel?
Nah - Britain's Got Talent!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s0xk
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000rx55
https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2021/02/04/dido-harding-nobody-predicted-covid-variants/
"With the cash thrown at various tracing platforms, you could have built a dozen more vaccine production lines"
There is a bit of "analysis paralysis" going on. I have seen a few stories that say TnT is far less useful as something like this migrates. There are too many possible vectors to analyze and get a useful pattern from.
One interesting look was when ThunderF00t overlaid commercial airplane routes with cases early on. It's something that epidemiologists had postulated would be how a pathogen would travel in the modern world. Not the way you want to prove a hypothesis, but it is meaningful. International flights should have been the first thing to get locked down.
Building a vaccine production plant, especially for the novel kind of vaccine that is supplied inside a different virus, costs much more than a few paltry millions. A few million quid is enough to run one secondary school.
You think that these things are tiny so it shouldn't cost much... or talk about the successful microelectronics company that moves to smaller premises.
Actually "our" actual micro chip factories are very expensive, very clean... very few. And the vaccines are even smaller... (and are not related to micro chips at all! Obviously!)
Then there's the tiny special bottles... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55808640
Which have to be extra extra strong so they can be filled with vaccine at the speed of sound (maybe).
The amount of shit the UK government got for trying to develop an app before going with an alternative. Japan, highly regarded in technological circles and efficiency release an app that didn't do its intended job at all. People are quick to judge and criticise when minds are changed and ultimately the right decision is made. At least our government made the right decision instead of going ahead with something that didn't work.
RE: "At least our government made the right decision instead of going ahead with something that didn't work."
They made the right decision are spending 12 million pounds trying to get an app that anyone who has any experience with coding for iOS could have (and frequently did) told them would never work due to Apple's restrictions on multi tasking within iOS. Essentially, nearly any app (with some very limited exceptions) gets a few minutes of runtime in the background before it is suspended to save power. I think it's about 2 or 3 minutes. Even in that 2 or 3 minutes, access to the phone's hardware (e.g. Bluetooth) is limited. The original app would not have been able to make bluetooth contact with other devices when running in the background. It probably would have worked, but would have required everyone to keep the app running in the foreground, with GPS enabled. With the best will in the world, that would not have happened.
The current version relies on an OS process to do the Bluetooth tracking, which has the advantage that being an OS process, it isn't affected by the restrictions on apps, and actually runs regularly if the App is installed. Beyond first launch, you don't even need to have the app running.
I do blame the government because they ignored warnings of various experts, and essentially wasted 12 million.
People should not put their faith in these distance-based apps. They try to detect whether you have been within 1.5m of a COVID-positive case for a significant amount of time, but it is now known that the virus is spread by aerosol. That means if you are within the same poorly-ventilated space as a case you can be exposed, and you don't even need to be very close.
Of particular relevance to Japan, if you're in the same train carriage you could be infected. In the case of outbreak Melbourne over the New Year, where you can walk through between carriages, they required the whole trainload to get tested and self-isolate.
Whereas Australia's app was (and possibly still is) also a dud, and the technical community were trying to get the government to admit that at the start of the pandemic, people are no longer wound up about it, and the app is mostly ignored. What we do have on our phones are QR check-in apps from our state governments, so it's known who else was in that space. We're also almost cashless here in Melbourne, so there's a timestamp on places like supernarkets and take-away which don't require QR checkin (some states do). If a case leaks out of quarantine, as happened this week, a list of exposure sites is posted within hours, and the government will phone those known to have been there at the time.
New Zealand never went down the proximity app rabbit-hole and jumped straight to QR codes from the very beginning,
How many people on one train tested positive?
https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/transmission-of-sars-cov-2-implications-for-infection-prevention-precautions
Remarks that longlived "aerosols" can exist, at least in the laboratory, with detectable virus, may not prove that infection can occur. And if we're still talking about little drops of water... don't they evaporate?
I'm presuming that the web page hasn't been updated recently because it doesn't need to be...?
The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare will work to eliminate obstacles by mid-February and will thoroughly control quality
Shouldn't quality control have been a top priority before it was released?
The Play page also reveals the app has been downloaded over five million times, nowhere near enough adoption for it to be a useful contact-tracing tool
Have any of these apps been downloaded enough times to make a difference? Have they been a complete waste of money?
Just found this on Huffpost UK:
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/test-and-trace-dodgy-statistics-impact-on-r_uk_601d7a82c5b66c385ef91a9f
"Test and Trace chair Dido Harding repeated this week to MPs her claim that it had cut the R number by up to 0.6 and was on track to cut it by 0.8 in high prevalence areas of the UK.
But it has emerged that the boast is calculated by comparing the service’s impact with what would happen if no one self-isolated upon getting symptoms of the virus.
Moreover, details buried in Test and Trace’s own business plan reveal that 90% of its claimed cut in transmission comes from people who isolate as soon as they get symptoms – even before coming into contact with the service.
The remaining 10% comes from those who isolate after being told they have a positive test."
How is she still in the job?
As I understand it, Diane Abbott's problem was that she is diabetic, and was experiencing hypoglycaemia at tithe time of her interview where she seriously got some numbers wrong. Also Diane Abbott was a shadow cabinet member, not actually in power.
Dido Harding is in a position of great responsibility, ands seems to be ignoring the effects of the national lockdown on the reproduction rate of Covid-19 in order to claim more success than she deserves.
The one was a mistake due to a medical condition, the other was, as far as I can make out, deliberate misinformation designed to make her look good. I'm sure most Reg Readers can tell the difference.
(Hard hat on ready for the down-votes.)
I have the NHS app, and do scan the qr codes when required. Although seeing as currently the only time I can go out and actually go to somewhere where I might need to scan the code, it's for food shopping ATM, I don't scan them much.
My understanding is that the app is supposed to be an add on to a working test and trace system. It's not supposed to be a replacement. Test and trace does appear to have worked in some countries (South Korea springs to mind). However, the South Korean system is much more invasive than ours. Their system gives the local CDCs access to the GPS data of any phones used in given areas, as well as local CCTV footage and card transactions. This does enable the CDC to contact anyone who was in the area with someone who later tests positive. It's also a massive invasion of privacy that I shouldn't think for a second would have been tolerated by our population (who seem perfectly happy to give that information out to whoever facebook and google sell it to anyway).
They also acted early, and had enforced restrictions early.
The UK government has managed ( although I do not think they know the meaning of this word) to do absolutely everything wrong and much too late. They have lied and denied about everything from the start and hope people forget about their early discussions wher they admitted that certain people were expendable and would be sacrificed for the fitter and more deserving.
They have been helped by our NHS (not healthy service) which has been well nown to have an appalling record in managing infection control for decades before.
The government had one lucky break while they were wasting our cash on everything their consultant friends flogged them and they managed to get early options on vaccines, probably because thay were far less choosy in what that bought than anyone else.
In getting us into this mess they invented their own special brand of"science" and a completely new mathematics and accounting system where nothing adds up and only their special advisors know the rules.
You may think they don't believe they will be here when someone discovers this mess needs to be paid for sometime.
If they had the common sense you would think that they are aiming to kill off anyone infirm or old so thay can save a fortune on pension, hospital and social care costs.
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