You’ve not been keeping up with how bad things are in England then... they’re nowhere near over this because of Boris and his morons.
The problem is not 2.5 or 3m but people that are say 10 metres away. Bluetooth was never built for measuring distance. In fact it’s built to maintain a strong connection over longer distances, which makes it harder to use signal strength to determine distance.
System One is not NHS and it certainly didn’t cost £10bn. You’re mixing it up with NHS Connecting for Care.
Just disable the API in settings, and turn off your bluetooth. Bluetooth is always broadcasting anyway, so you could be tracked that way as well.
Apple calibrates the the RSSI in their phones and its pretty accurate, I wrote an app that used bluetooth to calculate distances and it was usually accurate within a foot or so. Android had to go and test the RSSI of a bunch on devices to get the RSSI correct. Both are accurate enough to know if you within a couple of meters or not, it's not going to say that someone 10 meters away is within 2 meters.
Because different region have different public health regulations, and there’s no way to make an app that have every possible combination of the configurations required.
I am not sick and have no Covid symptoms. Why would I self quarantine? I am taking all necessary social distancing measures. Some background information for the holier-than-thou: my hotel in Scotland is going to extraordinary lengths to protect the staff and guests. Including room sterilisation but no room servicing during the stay, mandatory skin temperature sensor in the lobby, cutlery in sterile packs... Mostly, having a break in Scotland is about taking hikes in the countryside where you can go a whole day without seeing another soul.
That sounds like defeatist nonsense to me. A suitably engineered app would provide hooks for subscribing authorities to implement their own workflow where required.
What Apple and Google have developed is an API that measures how close phones are to each other and for how long. It is used for medical purposes, but the API itself has nothing to do with health. Therefore it doesn't need to pass any health regulations.
Two things:
An API is the simplest way to do that which is what Google and Apple did.
They have everything to do with it: making decisions to keep the economy in as good a position as possible while preventing the virus from spreading. Neither of these clowns made any good decisions and still continue to blunder everything. Meanwhile, many of the sensible leaders have kept their economies above water *and* managed to suppress the virus through good public guidance.
Of course, this system will have false positives. But so has any other method identifying candidates for a COVID-19 test and/or quarantining, like symptomatic people, travelers from high-risk areas, front-line workers, or manually contact-traced people. Given that the positivity rate (percentage of people taking a COVID-19 test actually testing positive) in countries which have things reasonably under control tends to be in the range of 5%, any additional method generating testing candidates with a false positive rate as high as 90% would actually be an improvement in the usefulness of the deploying of testing resources.
The publicly available information suggests that the rate of false positives may be too high to be confident to tell people to isolate. You can inform people that they may have been exposed and should look out for symptoms and get tested, but if only 1% of people being notified are genuinely exposed, you could end up in a situation where practically everyone in the country is permanently being told to isolate, which defeats the whole point of the app, so I can understand the caution of just alerting people and not asking them to isolate, until the accuracy is at least as good as other methods.
Close to 20 million people have downloaded the app in Germany, I have seen zero reports of practically everone of them being permanently told to isolate. There simply isn’t any data supporting your, I might say, wild speculations.
I'd suggest you look back in 12 months time, and then see how this pans out. To expect Politicians to immediately be all over this is naive. I work in Healthcare and amongst the senior doctors, anaesthetists and intensivists, there is a no clear pathway forward.
www.telegraph.co.uk
