What I wanted to share was this Dutch/Swedish research, but I can't so this has to do. Public debate around Covid-19 has been centered around "the app" for the past week and a half, even though evidence for its success is minimal at best. I was wondering if people have seen evidence that I haven't - right now I'm in the "this won't work" camp.
This new research suggests that even at 80% adoption by the population and perfect effectiveness of the app, it will only reduce the infection rate minimally. It also leads to a larger number of test that are required to have the app work as promised, the larger the share of users is in the population.
Instead, 20% random population testing is much, much more effective. Y-axis no. infected people, x-axis time.
Let's have some real talk for a moment. The basic problem we're facing, sociologically, is assessing our individual risk and assessing our societal risk. The even more basic problem is that unlike most threats, the more you dig into this one the less certainty you end up with because there are so many variables out of our control. Tribalism is the obvious and inevitable result: I align myself with the group that has interpreted the risk thusly. Because there are a number of different ways to assess risk, this has ended up aligning people on political axes: we will be fine if we take a miracle cure hyped by conservative talking heads or we will be fine if we surrender our personal info to the faceless data god or we will be fine if we lock up the useless old people while the rest of us strive in a Lutheran sort of way or we will be fine if we argue we will be fine because truth is subjective. Each group - and there are overlaps - acknowledge that there are no perfect solutions, but ideologically their risk assessment has been satisfied so what comes next they accept. "I am willing to die for this economy" is more than sloganeering it is a profession of clan identity. And as soon as the warring clans can arrive at a compromise that satisfies their credos we will enact that plan and people will get sick and die anyway and nothing can be done about it because we will have done everything we could to prevent the tragedy. 'cuz that's where we're all at. "What is the most I can REASONABLY do to prevent the death and discomfort of people I will never meet?" It's the place where my concrete reality and your abstract existence clash. Do you work with data? Then obviously an app and antibody tests will save the most lives and if people die, well they were going to die anyway "we did everything we could." Do you live in fear of data? Then obviously open up the economy and let's get on with this and if people die, well they were going to die anyway "we did everything we could." The medical community here in Seattle assumes at a baseline that most people have encountered COVID, have caught COVID, have gotten over COVID and are neck-deep in COVID most of the time but they took me and my daughter's temperature at her allergy appointment this morning because that's what you do, and you ask if you have a cough or symptoms and you say "no" because it's going to save us all time if I don't have to explain being turned down for COVID testing a month ago because fucking hell we're all wearing masks anyway. We're doing everything we can.
Even in Seattle, I don't think it's "most people", yet, but it's like we thought... because of how strapped we are for testing, we're definitely wayyyyyyy undercounting.The medical community here in Seattle assumes at a baseline that most people have encountered COVID, have caught COVID, have gotten over COVID and are neck-deep in COVID most of the time
That's just the thing, though - if everyone you meet has had someone in their house sick, for a long time, and no one can get tested... ...what do you do with that? And keep in mind: in Italy, breaking curfew without a positive COVID-19 test was the threat of a petty misdemeanor. Breaking curfew with a positive COVID-19 test was a voluntary manslaughter charge. Right now we're at "I probably had COVID so I'm going to try to do the right thing" vs "I definitely had COVID so now I'm a social pariah that everyone shuns". I did that calculus: if I decided to spend $15k out-of-pocket on a test, and it was negative, it would mean that at that very moment I didn't have COVID-19. If it were positive? I put 7 people out of work and launch 45 women at COVID wards to deliver their baby. What's the right choice there? Because that's what we're talking about: the "right" choice. Where none of us agree what "right" is.
In addition to what kleinbl00 said (which I largely agree with), there's another factor: there's no actual way to gauge success. One, we don't actually have an agreed-upon best-case scenario. But the other thing is that, no matter what, we're going to be looking at what we did versus a whole bunch of counter-factuals. There'll be retrospectives, think pieces, and analyses from hell to breakfast when this thing is over, but I expect it'll be some time before we can really make any reasonable conclusions about all this. I think what we're seeing is just how dependent our society is on certainty, and how poorly we handle a situation that doesn't allow for it. I posted a quote about six months ago suggesting this, and while it was shared, the only comments I got were uniformly critical. We've decided that wild speculation and complete guesses are better than someone saying "I don't know." A terrible plan is apparently better than no plan. The scientific community can't fully agree on a lot of this stuff, but "we're doing what we believe to be the best thing based on what we know right now" is not a good talking point. Plus, when the scientific consensus shifts (which it's supposed to do), this hurts the credibility of scientists in many people's minds, which is the opposite of what it should be doing. We'll never get the whole picture, so the best we can hope for is little bits of clarity here and there. But instead, because of the ideological baggage we've brought to bear, we're either left having to defend a seemingly-contradictory view (rather than just an updated one) or we take the change as proof that the source of this information was never credible to begin with, which we knew all along.