Apple and Google Launch COVID-19 Exposure Notification API, Over 20 Countries Have Requested and Received Access

[Ben...]

At that point the user will obviously no longer be anonymous.

If it operates only as intended by Apple and Google it would still be anonymous, amorphous to all those potentialy exposed through the user. Not anonymous to the health services obviously, as they are the ones diagnosing the user, but anonymous to everyone else. More importantly everyone the user has been near remains anonymous to the user and to the health authorities and to the government.

It will be the app itself that notifies other users of their potential exposure.

That's also why it would work globally.

Epidemiologists may not like it because they won't be able to trace the source of each infections, not with the app alone anyway.

 

[Tor Eckman]

The questions you posed
**Where is the tracking device for the flu?**
**Where are the flue quarantines?**
**Where were all of the hysterical masked people?**

All three of those exist.

-The tracking device is a computer, where a human logs all of the data.
-The "flue" quarantines are all over the place. An airplane being one that hit the news a few years back. Cruise ships get them all the time. Nursing homes and hospitals get quarantined often. They're shorter periods of time and localized, a week at most.
-People wear masks in locations of flu outbreaks. It's standard droplet precaution and just the smart thing to do. Go into other countries and they just wear them, period, all flu season. We have poor discipline here.

The transmission rate for this is considerably higher. The fatality rate is many orders of magnitude higher. There's NO VACCINE and no antibodies from prior infections to assist the body.

62000 deaths for a year with a disease that is everywhere already in a year the vaccine totally missed the mark and mutates every year, with scientists working 2 years in advance to map out what they believe the mutations will be so a mass produced vaccine can be ready in advance of that coming season.

We're approaching 100,000 for 3 months for a disease that needed to travel and we put all these restrictions in place you're saying we don't do for the flu ... and don't know yet if it's going to mutate and people are equating it to being similar to the flu still? Asinine.

This isn't the flu. It isn't anywhere close to the flu. Quit comparing it to the flu. If we shut down the nation at the start of the flu season for a week, there'd be next to zero flu cases. This isn't a flu, people can't stress that enough apparently.

There are no widely used tracking devices for the flu worn by people broadcasting their medical condition. There are no general lockdowns for healthy people and mass closings of businesses during flu season. The grocery stores, home centers, etc., are not filled with masked people wearing sandwich gloves with carts filled with toilet paper and bleach during flu season. We don't do anything like the hysterical overreaction for the flu that we have done for 19. You have stipulated that these sort of extreme measures would save flu death victims, though, so why have we not done those things? Why don't those people matter? If you are correct and shutting down the nation would stop 10s of thousands of flu deaths every year shouldn't we be doing that? This is not about saving people though, we could do all kinds of things to save lives that we never even talk about. Fauci has stated more than once that a viable, safe, readily available vaccine will not be ready for maybe two years, and considering how contagious 19 is, and the fact that people can't stay locked in their home for two years, we will all be exposed by then. What if a vaccine is not effective and/or what if 19 is here forever? What if half the people refuse to take a vaccine when and if it becomes available? So we will be exposed and bankrupt... At least it's not all that serious for the great majority of people, though -- just like the flu -- and many people never even show symptoms. The great majority of deaths are old people with comorbidities and maybe we should be using resources to quarantine and protect them and let the rest of the country get back to normal. Do you have a job, 401k, house payment, etc? Are you still getting income and paying your bills? Do you have an opinion about the increased deaths and illnesses as a side effect of the lockdowns and job losses, from substance abuse, suicides, mental health decline, and deaths from otherwise preventable and treatable conditions -- I cited links to information about all of those things above.

 

[IV1]

If Apple is betting on each country’s public health institution building an app thus making at best dumb government bureaucrats and/or doctors who have much more important work than making apps for this to apply for using this I must say I’m really disappointed by them (or did I miss how do parties of interest apply for enabling this themselves?)...there will not be an institution in most countries capable of building out an app for this and limiting individuals or companies to do it seems like they don’t really care about less privileged countries...I do agree there should be one app per country but since they own the App Store they can easily control this, also once inter-country travel restores, there should still be an ability to have users switch to SIM cards used in those less privileged regions without loosing this ability.