Reply to post: Re: What?

Re: What?

Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a difference between 'not working perfectly' and 'not being useful'?

Any method of evaluating whether you have been exposed to enough of the thing to infect you short of actually directly detecting an infection is going to be only statistically useful and subject to both false positives and false negatives. And it's trivially easy to invent both cases for something like the BT thing – stand the other side of a closed window from someone who is infected for an hour and you'll get a false positive, stand for an hour next to someone who is infected in a sufficiently electrically noisy environment and you'll get a false negative. That doesn't mean the tool is useless. It may actually be nearly useless, but these things don't show it is.

Certainly, given the current thing seems to be pretty good privacy-wise, people refusing to use it because there can be false positives and negatives and fals positives might slightly inconvenience them are actively helping to make it less useful and thus increasing the risk for everyone, in just the same way anti-vaxxers do (vaccines, of course, are also only statistically effective). So thanks for that.

And in the concrete case you suggest, well: if I'd stood that close to someone infected in an enclosed space where the air conditioning is busily circulating the air around and where there's not an airtight barrier for long enough that the system thought I was at risk then, actually I'd kind of like to know that before going to visit my elderly relatives, because I'd rather be very sure indeed they didn't die because of me. Because, you know, I care about other people.

In fact even the ghost alerts were kind of useful. I live in a fairly small town where, given estimated current infection rates in the region, we'd probably expect no-one to be infected. I got a ghost alert the other day: so now I know that there almost certainly is at least one person known to be infected here (it might have been a passing car), and that's kind of a useful data point.