News: 1592485810

Centralised app now abandoned in favour of Apple/Google decentralised app.

My guess is the delay until Winter is because their centralised app probably didn't work as expected., so now they have to go back and start over with a new one based on the Google/Apple APIs.

The danger with waiting until winter is that will there be enough up take of it? as there is already some COVID19 fatigue where people have started to switch off from the news because they are fed up about everything being about the virus.

All the technical issues were around the detection via bluetooth. Now they've delegated that to Google and Apple, what technical challenges remain that requires this much time to do the work?

Bluetooth doesn't do any detection, it can just be used to swap keys and provide an approximate distance between devices. So, yes, there are still technical problems to solve.

I think we're both right.

According to Google, their API does more than you suggest: "The Exposure Notification Bluetooth Specification ... uses Bluetooth beaconing to detect proximity." - so an app developer doesn't have to solve that problem, they just need to turn it on.

However, what it does is a bit less than I thought. But Google do provide sample app code and sample notification server code - see https://www.google.com/covid19/exposurenotifications/ - so anyone could build an Android prototype on the back of this very quickly (but won't be able to publish the app).

So I still think the hardest low level technical issues have been taken away from the app developer

"COVID19 fatigue where people have started to switch off from the news"

I couldn't get enough information about it for the first month or two and watched the daily briefing religiously every day. Now I'm frankly so bored by the whole thing that I haven't watched the briefing for a couple of weeks and change channel when the news interviews politicians about the subject.

The BBC and Sky news to a lesser extent have also become extremely tedious, picking random families across the land and interviewing them on "how they feel" about this or that related to the lockdown etc.

I know I *should* keep informed on developments and the latest policies, but my boredom threshold has been breached and I suspect that of many other people has too.

I think that getting folks to install the tracing app come Winter may be an uphill struggle.

The general news is not a good source because it focuses mainly on the numbers and then the "human interest". There's so much other stuff going on, but this is how the news cycle works and fatigue is normal.

For example, German news yesterday decided to report that Sweden now has > 5000 deaths and a mortality rate five times that of Germany's. It didn't mention that reported cases have increased recently as Sweden is now testing more. Nor that admittances to ICU wards and fatalities continue on a downwards trend. It also claimed that Sweden's approach is controversial but failed to mention that the main party of government continues to rise in the polls. All policies are detabable but FWIW in Sweden the main difference has been not closing schools and nurseries or restaurants. But people have still been asked not to travel even in Sweden and hospitals and care homes have strict hygiene regimes.

The focus on numbers keeps people scared, makes whipping boys easy to find but doesn't explain much. It also doesn't really prepare us for a possible spike in the autumn: we're not going to eradicate infections before then and we still don't really know what the best protective measures are. Oh, and along wih age, socioeconomic status is the biggest determinant for morbidity and mortality. But let's not talk about that because poverty implies class and discussions about prevent the middle-class from feeling self-righteous.

Try and listen to a general science report if you can as this should contain less repetition and more information. With so many resources being poured into research there is some very interesting stuff coming out and cooperation worldwide is impressive. But there is also an awful lot of duplicated research based on undersized studies, which means opportunities lost.

I'm generally a big fan of the news but this focus on quantitative reporting and the "won't someone think of the children" outrage as justification for removing people's freedom has made me increasingly sceptical: I know what the news will be before it's broadcast.

Of course none of us saw this coming...

Any chance the government can re-negotiate the ridiculously over-the-top fee for developing a UI on top of a working solution?

Bwahahah

Also it's open source.

I'll fork it and rebrand for one hundred thousand pounds.

They won't take you seriously at that price. Add a couple of zeros, at least. I'll take 10% for helping you increase your profit margin ;-)

"They won't take you seriously at that price"

Regrettably true. They're happy paying 900k to "rebrand" a plane. And the BoE has just given them 100 billion to spend.

Meanwhile, at Crapita HQ the business development team are typing up the latest "as suggested by el reg badge holders" proposal...

I think the new £100bn in QE is for commercial banks to use for loans to assist the economy where the COVID-19 specific schemes aren't applicable. BoE has already extended the govt's contingency fund (its overdraft facility, if you will), which is different to normal government borrowing.

The German one cost a mere € 20 million. Mind you, it was developed by T-Systems and SAP so what do you expect. As to whether it works: only time will really tell. They might help a bit.

But these apps can never replace testing. The faster you can test people, the less contact-tracing you have to do. But testing is more expensive…

Not only that, Google provides a sample client app and matching notification server code to go with it. As a well known TV presenter used to say...

"How hard can it be?"

I assumed "winter is coming" was a dig at Raab saying 'taking a knee' came from Game of Thrones.

This latest u-turn hardly inspires confidence in the government, but I guess I'll install it. It's sad that I trust Google-Apple on privacy more than my nation.

ETA: I just heard it will still be a government app but based on the Google-Apple model. So no ta.

The Apple-Google model is decentralized, so it will always be more secure than the initial plan.

Also, I suspect that the only "government" element of this app will be the gov.uk logo for the icon.

The usual response on a UK gov technology project that's run into problems.

Extend the delivery date then quietly kill it when it's a less newsworthy issue.

My parents are old enough and frail enough that I really do care. Yet the process around getting these apps going seems to be one of never-ending debate over privacy issues. As the first wave of infection has declined complacency seems to be setting in and I see little sense of urgency. My reading of the stats suggests the chances are there will be a second wave.

We clearly need to be pushing ahead with both threads of development - the one using the Google/Apple API that seems to protect privacy while largely precluding epidemiological research, AND the independent alternative that seems to run up against issues with iOS. That this second option has proved so problematic for so many countries seems to me to be a huge indictment of how the industry has evolved over the past decade.

To any developers out there: please just get ***** thing working.

Epidemiological research is already possible, see the app from Kings for example. Trying to make it identical to contact tracing is a problem. You do not need to recruit everyone in the country to do research, and this is the barrier they have unnecessarily raised for themselves.

Have you a reference for this Kings app? My guess is that the work that is achievable under the heading of epidemiology will be very severely constrained. It will not, I suspect, be able to work with the wealth of location and profile data that I naturally assume Google is already holding on me and every other Android user.

Remember. Real people are dying. Just get the ***** thing working!

This one:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/symptom-tracker-app-hits-15-million-uk-users

They've already published some work I believe.

Edit:

I should add that a contact tracing app will not simply make coronavirus go away. Though it will possibly pick up contacts that manual tracing does not (and miss some it does) https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2020/uk-modelling-study-finds-case-isolation-and-contact-tracing-vital-covid-19, meaning the "we find people prefer the personal touch" answer given is misinformed about the difference between the two approaches. Whether it's intentional to confuse the two or not I don't know. (Manual contact tracing also relies on a website, and apparently people are encouraged to fill their contacts in online, so the personal touch is somewhat missing there.)

I've never before felt that literally everything my Government says will turn out to have been actual bollocks. About the only thing keeping the infection rate down at the moment is the fact that it's raining, and I've no doubt they'll find a way to take credit for that.

The hint of localised levels of lockdown based on DefCon numbers seems to have gone by the by.

England is still officially at level 4 because the chief medical officer won't sign off on lowering it, but the government is opening up everything anyway and has quietly buried the idea of alert levels. It's become meaningless.

I think it was meaningless from the get-go. Just another silly system involving five things to try and give the illusion of there being a plan. Perversely enough it's actually given Whitty a tool to express his displeasure, though I'd rather he just came out and slagged them off properly at one of the briefings…but I presume he's disinclined to do that because he knows he'd be replaced immediately. UK governments do not seem to like evidence-based anything.

So after years of ignoring or putting the phone down on cold calling call centres trying to spam us with crap or other scams, the Govt now seriously expects people to start answering the phone to random callers who are telling them they have been in contact with someone infected?

Shirley it doesn't take a genius to work out how well that will go down, or indeed how long it will take for all of these scam peddlers to start the impersonation game and use this as yet another way to hook the gullible and vulnerable (given that iirc it's actually started already even before the contact tracing has)?

Would you trust a cold call on such a subject?

No. Especially as they are not allowed to say who you may have caught the virus from for data protection reasons; so you have no anchor on reality to substantiate their claim.

I'd hear them out though, but the moment they want either financial information or to "take me through security" I'd hang up on them.

"It was an expectations-management answer."

And that answer itself is a straight answer. From a politician, no less.

It's all Apple's fault, apparently.

But we all knew that before HM Govm't spent a load of money trying to develop something that they knew would not work in the Apple walled garden.

But hey why listen to the technologists when BoJo has spoken (probably with Cummings's arm pulling his vocal chords.}