Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!
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@Gąska I think this a mistake in the article.
Pfizer's vaccine instructions for doctors says that the FDA says the vaccine prevents COVID. I'm 90% sure the other vaccine uses the same wording.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use
Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product,
Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, for active immunization to prevent
COVID-19 in individuals 16 years of age and older.
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@Gąska From https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/vaccine-benefits.html (emphasis added):
COVID-19 vaccination will help keep you from getting COVID-19
- All COVID-19 vaccines currently available in the United States have been shown to be highly effective at preventing COVID-19. Learn more about the different COVID-19 vaccines.
- All COVID-19 vaccines that are in development are being carefully evaluated in clinical trials and will be authorized or approved only if they make it substantially less likely you’ll get COVID-19. Learn more about how federal partners are ensuring COVID-19 vaccines work.
- Based on what we know about vaccines for other diseases and early data from clinical trials, experts believe that getting a COVID-19 vaccine may also help keep you from getting seriously ill even if you do get COVID-19.
So it looks like both preventing infection and preventing symptoms if infected.
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat tests positive for Covid-19 | CNN Politics
Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York said Thursday he has tested positive for Covid-19 and is isolating at home, he announced in a series of tweets.
I know, politics, but there's something in the article that raises a few questions for me and I want to get educated by people who have a positive opinion about the vaccination program, ie. not the ones in Garage.
Additionally, the two vaccines currently authorized for emergency use by the US Food and Drug Administration have not yet been shown to prevent infection. They have been shown to prevent symptoms and severe disease.
This is the first time I ever heard about this. Maybe I'm just at reading news, but I was under impression they were meant to prevent infections, and thus further transmissions of the virus, and not just remove symptoms - speeding up the buildup of herd immunity.
Anyway. If the vaccine doesn't prevent infection, does it mean it's useless at eradicating the virus and the only way is to keep vaccinating everybody forever? Or is there something I'm missing?
Some vaccines are sterilizing--a vaccinated person (for whom it works) can neither become infected nor infect someone else.
Other vaccines are not sterilizing--they merely reduce the symptoms below some threshold (usually the threshold where we can tell). People who receive those vaccines can, in theory, still pass along the disease although they will not get sick.
HOWEVER, even a non-sterilizing vaccine should limit the spread of the disease, as ability to infect scales (non-linearly) with strength of symptoms (at least for COVID-19).
So a non-sterilizing vaccine will not help kill the virus, but will prevent most people from dying or becoming seriously ill. Basically turning it into another common cold at most. So there is benefit even from a non-sterilizing vaccine.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no hard data saying that the current COVID-19 vaccines are or aren't sterilizing. We just don't know. Although based on prior history, they probably are at least mostly sterilizing. I think. Maybe
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Anyway. If the vaccine doesn't prevent infection, does it mean it's useless at eradicating the virus and the only way is to keep vaccinating everybody forever? Or is there something I'm missing?
I think it's in large part due to how we redefined “infection”. I don't think any vaccine against any disease prevents PCR-positivity for the pathogen. It should shorten the period, but unlikely eliminate it completely.
@Benjamin-Hall said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Some vaccines are sterilizing--a vaccinated person (for whom it works) can neither become infected nor infect someone else.
Other vaccines are not sterilizing--they merely reduce the symptoms below some threshold (usually the threshold where we can tell). People who receive those vaccines can, in theory, still pass along the disease although they will not get sick.There is no hard line between these. Nor a perfectly sterilizing vaccine, really.
Imagine the immune system as an army. It sort of is. In non-vaccinated person, when the watchmen (non-specific immunity) notice a possible attacker (the pathogen), they summon the soldiers (lymphocytes), but those don't know what to do. The watchmen will capture some of the suspects, but have to wait for the commander (antigen-presenting cell) to investigate them and give the command for counter-attack (present the antigen, in ‘person’), and the command has to be distributed (the specific lymphocytes have to visit the antigen presenting cell and then multiply) and that takes time.
And vaccine is like someone coming to the commander with a picture of the attacker (pathogen) and telling them: “summon your troop and tell them this is an enemy”. And the commander orders “if you ever see this thing, attack it, it is confirmed enemy”. So when it is spotted, the soldiers will know to counter-attack without having to wait for the commander, so it is all much quicker.
But it still takes some time, and it still depends on the quality of the vaccinated person's immunity. The pathogen will take a bit of hold before it is detected, so given the sensitivity of the PCR tests, they will be PCR-positive for a while. It should be much shorter than if not vaccinated, because the immune system already knows what to do, but not zero.
And most people will defeat it before they get any symptoms, or become infectious—which is not a boolean either, the risk varies—at all. But some have bad immunity and will get symptoms anyway. That's the 95% efficiency. It's more than enough. If the reproduction number goes significantly below one, the disease will exponentially diminish. But it will take time. Only one disease was completely eradicated so far.
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@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
given the sensitivity of the PCR tests, they will be PCR-positive for a while.
Especially if the PCR is run for a ridiculous number of cycles.
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Anyway. If the vaccine doesn't prevent infection, does it mean it's useless at eradicating the virus and the only way is to keep vaccinating everybody forever? Or is there something I'm missing?
It technically makes the body respond much more rapidly and thoroughly to infection, reducing the amount which it spreads and the severity of the disease while one has it. Also, it's very much not instant. It takes several weeks after the vaccine is received for the full activity to be present (its effectiveness ramps up over that time; the exact shape of that depends on one's own biology in ways that I forget) and the full protection is only there some time after the second injection.
By reducing the severity and infectiousness, the disease goes from something nasty that's trying to run rampant to something mostly mild that sputters out (at the population level) and emergency healthcare can largely cope with the few people for whom it becomes a real problem.
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@dkf so, we will indeed have to keep vaccinating forever?
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@Gąska No; after the second injection (or rather after a week or two after it; your doctor will tell you how much) you'll be good for quite a long while. Exact amount unknown.
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@dkf long enough to make the virus go extinct before most people lose the immunity? Especially considering that the vaccine only prevent transmissions partially (meaning the virus will keep multiplying, although at lower rate)? Maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like the only way to go is to keep vaccinating every single person forever after, like we already do with tuberculosis and other almost extinct diseases.
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@Gąska Nobody knows for sure. But getting things so that it isn't a pandemic any more would be a damn good start.
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@dkf but that's the thing. If the vaccine lets the virus live in "healthy" infividuals and continue asymptomatically infecting others, the pandemic eill never end - or rather, will return as soon as we stop vaccinating, very similar to what happened with TB.
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@Gąska This is correct; if that's the case with the vaccine behaviour then that'll be the outcome. What exactly happens will be found out by long-term observational studies, but sitting tight on doing any kind of action while we wait for that data to come in is intensely impractical and inhumane. As so often in life, you have to act before you have perfect knowledge…
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@dkf but that's the thing. If the vaccine lets the virus live in "healthy" infividuals and continue asymptomatically infecting others, the pandemic eill never end - or rather, will return as soon as we stop vaccinating, very similar to what happened with TB.
Which would still make things manageable: there haven’t been large-scale outbreaks of TB in developed countries for a long time, because public health institutions watch for the disease and make efforts to prevent its spread when it does appear. That could be done with COVID-19 too, if it seems hard to completely get rid of once it has been mostly eradicated.
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@Gurth yeah, except TB has been on a rapid rise for the past 10 years, especially in highly developed countries. And considering how highly politicized COVID is...
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@dkf but that's the thing. If the vaccine lets the virus live in "healthy" infividuals and continue asymptomatically infecting others, the pandemic eill never end - or rather, will return as soon as we stop vaccinating, very similar to what happened with TB.
Since it's a zoonosis, if we stop vaccinating, it will promptly return from some natural reservoir anyway.
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
long enough to make the virus go extinct before most people lose the immunity
NO.
Because that virus does infect several animals, which in turn can spread the virus among each other, and sometimes back to humans (last step shown with minks, no proof yet with e.g. cats). And since captive animals are absofuckinglutely ignored by our health authorities, the disease will come back.Edit:
'd
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Gurth yeah, except TB has been on a rapid rise for the past 10 years, especially in highly developed countries.
Damned antivaxers...
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
long enough to make the virus go extinct
Extremely unlikely, at least in a time scale less than decades. Only one pathogenic virus has been brought to effective extinction in the history of modern medicine, smallpox. Efforts to combat smallpox started before 1800 and finally achieved success in 1980. The cost from 1967 to 1979 alone was about $300 million (somewhere between about 1 – 1.5 billion in today's dollars, depending on how you average the 300 million over that 12 year period), most of which was spent distributing the vaccine and administering it in 3rd-world countries, since vaccination was already widespread in developed countries.
For comparison, the US government is currently spending more than $3 billion just to develop vaccines for COVID. God only knows how much it will cost and how long it will take to administer them worldwide.
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This is suboptimal:
Almost a third of recovered Covid patients return to hospital in five months and one in eight die
Almost a third of recovered Covid patients will end up back in hospital within five months and one in eight will die, alarming new figures have shown. Research by Leicester University and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found there is a devastating long-term toll on survivors of severe...
Note: they're talking about people who had to be admitted to a hospital for COVID, not all people infected with COVID. But it's all pretty preliminary at this point so who knows?
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Note: they're talking about people who had to be admitted to a hospital for COVID, not all people infected with COVID. But it's all pretty preliminary at this point so who knows?
The long covid syndrome seems to be fucking awful.
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
This is suboptimal:
Almost a third of recovered Covid patients will end up back in hospital within five months and one in eight will die, alarming new figures have shown. Research by Leicester University and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found there is a devastating long-term toll on survivors of severe...
Note: they're talking about people who had to be admitted to a hospital for COVID, not all people infected with COVID. But it's all pretty preliminary at this point so who knows?
Hmmm...
Knowing what we do about the demographics of people likely to be hospitalised with COVID, what are the odds that this is mostly due to selection bias?
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@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
This is suboptimal:
Almost a third of recovered Covid patients will end up back in hospital within five months and one in eight will die, alarming new figures have shown. Research by Leicester University and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found there is a devastating long-term toll on survivors of severe...
Note: they're talking about people who had to be admitted to a hospital for COVID, not all people infected with COVID. But it's all pretty preliminary at this point so who knows?
Hmmm...
Knowing what we do about the demographics of people likely to be hospitalised with COVID, what are the odds that this is mostly due to selection bias?
Yeah, I wouldn't panic over this yet but it's something to keep in mind.
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@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Knowing what we do about the demographics of people likely to be hospitalised with COVID, what are the odds that this is mostly due to selection bias?
With the current talk of more young (and otherwise healthy) people being admitted to hospitals due to severe COVID symptoms, it looks like we'll get the answer to that question one way or another in about half a year.
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@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
This is suboptimal:
Almost a third of recovered Covid patients will end up back in hospital within five months and one in eight will die, alarming new figures have shown. Research by Leicester University and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found there is a devastating long-term toll on survivors of severe...
Note: they're talking about people who had to be admitted to a hospital for COVID, not all people infected with COVID. But it's all pretty preliminary at this point so who knows?
Hmmm...
Knowing what we do about the demographics of people likely to be hospitalised with COVID, what are the odds that this is mostly due to selection bias?
It's hard to navigate through this twisty little maze of links, all alike. Even Slashdot is less confusing, so let's go from there:
Epidemiology of post-COVID syndrome following hospitalisation with coronavirus: a retrospective cohort study
Objectives The epidemiology of post-COVID syndrome (PCS) is currently undefined. We quantified rates of organ-specific impairment following recovery from COVID-19 hospitalisation compared with those in a matched control group, and how the rate ratio (RR) varies by age, sex, and ethnicity. Design...
Conclusions Individuals discharged from hospital following COVID-19 face elevated rates of multi-organ dysfunction compared with background levels, and the increase in risk is neither confined to the elderly nor uniform across ethnicities. The diagnosis, treatment and prevention of PCS require integrated rather than organ- or disease-specific approaches. Urgent research is required to establish risk factors for PCS.
At least the study claims that it's not due to age selection bias. Of course, there is already the prior selection bias of getting admitted to the hospital in the first place, but that's apparently factored in.
Who
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I don't have the time to read the entire study right now, but just the brief glance at the data that I had doesn't convince me to discard the selection bias hypothesis, the selection being "was admitted to the hospital with Covid".
Remember that "long Covid" is exactly what we'd expect to see if the disease was mostly harmless to anyone other than people who were generally unhealthy to begin with (this correlates with age). In such a case, the overwhelming majority of people admitted to the hospital would be people likely to be hospitalised for one of their other conditions (that may not have been previously diagnosed) some time in the near future.
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat tests positive for Covid-19 | CNN Politics
Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York said Thursday he has tested positive for Covid-19 and is isolating at home, he announced in a series of tweets.
I know, politics, but there's something in the article that raises a few questions for me and I want to get educated by people who have a positive opinion about the vaccination program, ie. not the ones in Garage.
Additionally, the two vaccines currently authorized for emergency use by the US Food and Drug Administration have not yet been shown to prevent infection. They have been shown to prevent symptoms and severe disease.
This is the first time I ever heard about this. Maybe I'm just at reading news, but I was under impression they were meant to prevent infections, and thus further transmissions of the virus, and not just remove symptoms - speeding up the buildup of herd immunity.
That's just a journalist being stupid. Of course it won't "prevent infection." How would that even work? Are vaccines supposed to give our immune system some sort of point defense system to actively target and shoot down germs outside the body? (And would we even want such a thing? Wasn't there a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where someone with an immune system like that turned out to inadvertently be the cause of everyone else's health problems?)
Vaccines don't prevent infection; they teach the body to cope with the infection. What they "prevent" is the long ramping-up time that we usually have to spend before the immune system is ready to overwhelm the infection.
Anyway. If the vaccine doesn't prevent infection, does it mean it's useless at eradicating the virus and the only way is to keep vaccinating everybody forever? Or is there something I'm missing?
A virus is a ridiculously hard thing to eradicate. Just look at polio. We got an effective vaccine in 1953, but it's still around! Anyone who thinks Covid will disappear as vanish as quickly as it appeared simply we have a vaccine now doesn't know what they're talking about; that was never a realistic possibility at any point after it first escaped China. Covid is going to be a fact of life, like any other common illness, for another 20 years minimum and probably significantly longer.
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@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
if the disease was mostly harmless
I hate that phrase. If the disease were to only put 45% (of the infected part) of the population in hospital and kill 20% of them, it might still be characterised as “mostly harmless” but nobody would be happy with getting it.
AFAICT (from not very thorough monitoring of the research), it looks like long covid is related to excess clotting and over-activation of the immune system so that it starts attacking the body's own tissues. That's all based on rather preliminary research reports, of course, but would explain the long effects (because immune activations are typically many months long) and the seemingly random incidence (because immune activity levels are known to be all over the.place, due to a mixture of genetic and historical environmental factors; many of the complexities of diseases as disparate as cancer and rheumatoid arthritis are down to similar concerns).
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@dkf We'll just have to see, won't we?
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@dkf said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
The long covid syndrome seems to be fucking awful.
I have a colleague who, in about 6 weeks, will have been off sick an entire year with that. It's nasty.
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@dkf said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
if the disease was mostly harmless
I hate that phrase. If the disease were to only put 45% (of the infected part) of the population in hospital and kill 20% of them, it might still be characterised as “mostly harmless” but nobody would be happy with getting it.
I think we'd have a different description of it at that point. That's so much worse than what we're dealing with right now even if the "long COVID" thing is as bad as that article says it might be.
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Hackers 'manipulated' stolen COVID-19 vaccine data before leaking it online
European Medicines Agency says investigation into cyberattack has revealed the hackers have attempted to "undermine trust" in COVID-19 vaccines.
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I've been looking for the annual Chaos Communications Congress talks and didn't find them until today because they weren't under "37C3" like I expected, but ancasted as "RC3". They usually have amusing talks about how pwnable things we consider secure are.
This year did not disappoint:
Edited to add: There's also some technical background, if you want it:
https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-11517-covid-19_exposure_notifications
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@TwelveBaud Do people actually use those contact-tracing apps? Around here no one talks about them anymore since at least a few months, and while they boasted download numbers some months ago they were fairly low when compared to total population (and they only reflect downloads, not people actually turning the app on -- anecdotally I know at least one person who has the app but "I only turn it on when going in a crowded place... when I don't forget about it... so yeah, I haven't turned it on for months").
(which IMO isn't surprising, for two reasons. From a public health point of view, the whole contact tracing thing is pointless when you are in the tens of thousands of cases per day; and from the privacy angle, I've said since the beginning that we're reaping two decades of unsecured internet, shitty IoT and no-one caring about privacy, resulting in no-one trusting those systems from the technological side (not even mentioning the moral side))
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@remi said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@TwelveBaud Do people actually use those contact-tracing apps?
I do. It's probably not at all effective though because nobody else uses it.
And I also have no idea if the whole technology isn't pure snake oil. Not the premise of the app, the actual Bluetooth-based proximity detection. Other than Google/Apple saying "it works", I've not seen anything convincing that it does.Around here no one talks about them anymore since at least a few months, and while they boasted download numbers some months ago they were fairly low when compared to total population (and they only reflect downloads, not people actually turning the app on -- anecdotally I know at least one person who has the app but "I only turn it on when going in a crowded place... when I don't forget about it... so yeah, I haven't turned it on for months").
At least mine works in the background. I don't actually need to turn it on for it to work, I only turn it on to see results. Although I assume that would also work with notifications. The only thing I need to do is have the phone with me, which I always do anyway.
(which IMO isn't surprising, for two reasons. From a public health point of view, the whole contact tracing thing is pointless when you are in the tens of thousands of cases per day; and from the privacy angle, I've said since the beginning that we're reaping two decades of unsecured internet, shitty IoT and no-one caring about privacy, resulting in no-one trusting those systems from the technological side (not even mentioning the moral side))
The German app was designed with anonymity in mind. There's no centralized data base of people who met or where you are going. Only if you get a positive test result from your doctor and decide to share that result with the app does your short-time pseudonymous ID get saved in a central DB and flagged as positive. The app polls that DB every few hours to check if the pseudonyms it's been in contact with have signaled a positive case and then alerts you.
I'm sure there's some ways that would make it possible to abuse this (haven't watched the video above yet which will surely tell me how), but I trust this design more than some random "let's give all your data to big brother google and they'll tell you what's best for you" approach.
Now, there's been complaints that the app thing wasn't effective enough (I'm sure it wasn't) and that it could have been much more powerful if it was less focused on privacy. People argued that it should tell you who you met when and where that was positive, or that it should be mandatory, or whatever. I'm not sure if the app even had the technological potential to be more effective, but I do know that if it had been more invasive I wouldn't have installed it to begin with.
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In the Netherlands, a 21:00–04:30 curfew is causing riots:
Covid: Dutch curfew riots rage for third night
Police describe it as the worst unrest in the Netherlands for decades, with more than 180 arrests.
It looks like the first night was genuine protests against the COVID measures that got out of hand, but everything since then seems to be mostly people egging each other on to go and riot.
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@remi said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@TwelveBaud Do people actually use those contact-tracing apps? Around here no one talks about them anymore since at least a few months, and while they boasted download numbers some months ago they were fairly low when compared to total population (and they only reflect downloads, not people actually turning the app on -- anecdotally I know at least one person who has the app but "I only turn it on when going in a crowded place... when I don't forget about it... so yeah, I haven't turned it on for months").
Similar here.
If the apps were… no, if one, worldwide, app was created back in last April, people might have installed and used it. But mid-September or when it was released here nobody gave a shit any more, especially since it was already clear nobody is going to be able to get all those people tested anyway. So why bother?
(which IMO isn't surprising, for two reasons. From a public health point of view, the whole contact tracing thing is pointless when you are in the tens of thousands of cases per day; and from the privacy angle, I've said since the beginning that we're reaping two decades of unsecured internet, shitty IoT and no-one caring about privacy, resulting in no-one trusting those systems from the technological side (not even mentioning the moral side))
The tracing would be pointful to whatever scale it can be organized. European governments generally demonstrated they can't organize their way out of a box even if their life depends on it.
Also the understanding of how the disease spreads seems to still be fairly incomplete. Just yesterday a colleague wrote he's been diagnosed with covid. He's been working from home since mid-September and goes absolutely nowhere except for a walk with his little daughters, and he generally does not meet anybody else when he does. So where could he get it?
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@Bulb I take it he goes to shops for groceries and other essential supplies? Or, if he get them all delivered, does he have the delivery person put them outside his (closed) door, only opening it when the delivery person has left? Do his young daughters go to some kind of nursery or school? etc. etc.
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@remi Also, the application won't tell you of all risks—because there is still plenty of people with dumbphones—just some of them. So it will not calm you that you didn't encounter anybody ill, just scare you in case you do. And then, what are you going to do? Nobody wants to go in quarantine if they don't have any symptoms, especially since until quite recently they'd only get 60% of salary on the sick leave. So nobody wants to know anyway; they'll only go to the tests if they are actually sick, or need it for other reasons. So why bother again?
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@Gurth said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Bulb I take it he goes to shops for groceries and other essential supplies?
I believe his wife does. She might have brought it on something, maybe.
Do his young daughters go to some kind of nursery or school? etc. etc.
They are not of school age yet and as far as I can tell they are not going to nursery since their parents are at home anyway.
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@Bulb Well, there you go: somebody in the household who interacts with outsiders.
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I do. It's probably not at all effective though because nobody else uses it.
I use it too, but even if we assume that every single download of the app is a distinct person who's still using it then it's like a third of the population.
It's
at the moment anyway while we're in another lockdown.@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
The German app was designed with anonymity in mind. There's no centralized data base of people who met or where you are going.
The original NHS app for this ignored the Google/Apple functionality and was very much centralised. It also didn't really work as both iOS and newer versions of Android restrict what can be done when the phone is asleep.
Basically for it to work on iOS, you'd need to have the phone out and awake and on newer Android it'd only work within 15 minutes of the phone being awake.It took a few months for the NHS to realise it wouldn't work (plus even fewer people would install it) and switch to the Google/Apple Exposure Notification functionality.
@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I trust this design more than some random "let's give all your data to big brother google and they'll tell you what's best for you" approach.
The decentralised approach described is the Google/Apple approach.
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@loopback0 said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
The decentralised approach described is the Google/Apple approach.
Maybe, but it's not handled by sending stuff to Google. I don't care if Google came up with the approach as long as they're not touching my data.
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@loopback0 said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
It took a few months for the NHS to realise it wouldn't work (plus even fewer people would install it) and switch to the Google/Apple Exposure Notification functionality.
And every damn country made the same fucking experience, because they totally couldn't fucking cooperate. And then Google and Apple condescended to make the API to make it work, but everybody still wrote their own app for… what fucking reason? All the apps must work the same way after all.
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
The German app was designed with anonymity in mind. [etc.]
So do more or less all apps (well not the French one initially but I think they back-pedalled on that later). But that's not my point. What I'm saying is that for decades we (collectively, as societies) have pooh-poohed any security and privacy concerns about electronic stuff. As a result, people have read countless stories of hacks or data leaks, a large part of them happening for the dumbest of reasons (i.e. not extraordinarily smart hackers taking advantage of tiny surface attacks, but stuff like intranet pages publicly available on the internet, default passwords on critical systems etc.). Add to that countless cases of dumbly designed systems (mostly for IoT), the emergence of the internet giants and the opacity on how they handle data (whether it's normal business practice or shady stuff, the result is opacity as far as the end user is concerned) with some associated scandals, and the usual inability of regulators to regulate anything.
What you get in the end is a situation where society, as a whole, is no longer prepared to trust the IT sector to actually do things properly. Even if they swear that they do, even if they show all the technical blueprints, it's too late. The initial trust capital that might have existed (and that I think did exist around 2000) has been burnt through. So when we get to a situation where the IT sector might have actually something worth to contribute, we're no longer ready to trust them, and it doesn't work.
To me this whole thing about contact tracing apps is a perfect example of that systemic loss of trust. I'm somewhat saddened that not many people seem to see it that way, meaning that it's unlikely anything will be done to remedy it.
(compare and contrast with e.g. banks: despite their countless failures and issues, on the whole and at the broad society level, we trust that if we deposit $X on an account, we'll be able to pay up to $X from that account later. I'm not saying that there aren't problems and poorly designed systems etc. but overall, we all take the basics of a bank for granted -- whereas we don't really take the basics of a working IT system for granted, we all know that anything computer-related might break any time)
@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
The tracing would be pointful to whatever scale it can be organized. European governments generally demonstrated they can't organize their way out of a box even if their life depends on it.
I'm not entirely sure. I mean, sure, governments are pretty bad at organising anything, but I think that when the number of cases becomes too large, it's a pointless approach anyway.
Any tracing will never get 100% of contacts -- when you're only tracing a handful of initial cases that's not too big an issue because as long as you manage to maintain each outbreak isolated, you will be able to keep things under control. But when there are too many cases, the few contacts that go through each time are enough to become a significant un-caught population of contaminated persons (i.e. the fraction of contacts that a person actually contaminates times the number of original cases to trace becomes a large number, large enough that the virus keeps spreading).
What matters for contact tracing to work is not the percentage of contacts you identify (or rather conversely, those you miss), but the total number of contacts missed (across the whole population). The larger the number of cases, the tiniest the percentage has to be for each case in order to keep that total absolute number under control, and it just becomes impossible (unless going to Chinese-style permanent monitoring of everyone...). For social acceptance reasons, but also because as you say even the understanding of what a "contact" is (i.e. how does the virus spread) is still shaky, meaning that we have some sort of upper barrier on how many actual contacts (i.e. persons possibly contaminated by one case, whatever the transmission pathway) we can identify.
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Ad trust: as much as I wish you were right, I don't think Average Joe thinks that far. They simply don't see any point in installing the app at this point, so they don't even start to think whether they trust it and whether they care.
Ad tracing and scale: The tracing will never catch all contacts indeed, which is why it won't work as the only measure. But it can help the other measures, like screening, to be more targeted and therefore more efficient. Like if anybody in the West could organize efficient screening, of course. But it seems that in places like Korea they can do a much better job, so it does not require being a police state like PRC.
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@remi said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
To me this whole thing about contact tracing apps is a perfect example of that systemic loss of trust. I'm somewhat saddened that not many people seem to see it that way, meaning that it's unlikely anything will be done to remedy it.
It's sooooo far down the list examples of loss of trust (and I'm looking at society in general not just IT). Which makes it even sadder, because I kind of want it to fail now.
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@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
They simply don't see any point in installing the app at this point, so they don't even start to think whether they trust it and whether they care.
And they probably think that whatever the authorities and the media do about the data, it will not help and may ultimately be more harmful than doing nothing. I certainly feel that way.
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@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Ad trust: as much as I wish you were right, I don't think Average Joe thinks that far. They simply don't see any point in installing the app at this point, so they don't even start to think whether they trust it and whether they care.
Maybe, though at least half of the articles about those apps being about privacy/security/technical efficiency certainly does not help Average Joe get a positive view of the whole thing. He might not personally give a shit about all that, but it contributes to shaping his overall view.
Ad tracing and scale: The tracing will never catch all contacts indeed, which is why it won't work as the only measure. But it can help the other measures, like screening, to be more targeted and therefore more efficient.
Sure, but again above a certain number of cases, my opinion is that tracing does little good. The same resources (to trace contacts of several 1000's people per day!) are better used for other purposes. What's the point of tracking half of the population of a city to tell them to get tested, you'd better do a mass testing of everybody at that point, it's probably easier to organise and will have the same end result. Keep the tracing infrastructure in place but only use it intensively when you've managed to get case numbers down to something manageable.
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@Gurth said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
It looks like the first night was genuine protests against the COVID measures that got out of hand, but everything since then seems to be mostly people egging each other on to go and riot.
US Democrats: See!!! It's not just us!
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@remi said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Sure, but again above a certain number of cases, my opinion is that tracing does little good. The same resources (to trace contacts of several 1000's people per day!) are better used for other purposes. What's the point of tracking half of the population of a city to tell them to get tested, you'd better do a mass testing of everybody at that point, it's probably easier to organise and will have the same end result. Keep the tracing infrastructure in place but only use it intensively when you've managed to get case numbers down to something manageable.
The point of the apps (in theory, if they were effective) is that you don't just do the manual tracing, but that anyone who's been in contact with a positive case gets automatically notified (assuming they've both used the apps). If I get a notification that I've been in contact with a positive case and the risk was "high" (i.e. due to close proximity and long duration), then I can be on the outlook and make sure I don't spread it any further.
On the Effectiveness of Time Travel to Inject COVID-19 Alerts
