What a flood of hidden alerts in the UK means for exposure applications

“The NHS covid-19 application has been told to isolate more than 600,000 people during the week of July 8 in England and Wales,” he says, “but that’s a little more than double the number of new positive cases. criticizing pingdemic ‘has been misplaced: the app is basically working as usual. “

Christophe Fraser, an epidemiologist at the Big Data Institute at Oxford University the most notable studies on the effectiveness of the application, says that while it works as designed, there is another problem: a significant breach of the social contract. “People can see, on TV, raves and nightclubs are happening. Why do they tell me to stay home? Actually, this is actually it, ”he says.

He says the lack of clear and fair rules causes widespread frustration when people are told to isolate themselves. As we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, public health technology is closely linked to everything around it: the way it is marketed, the way it talks in the media, the way your doctor discusses it, the way it is (or is) supported by lawmakers.

“People want to do the right thing,” Fraser says. “They must be met halfway.”

How we got here

Exposure reporting applications are digital public health tactics that are at the forefront of the pandemic, and have already been widely criticized by those who say they have not succeeded. enough to use. Dozens of countries applications created to alert users to hidden exposure by sharing code and using a jointly developed framework Google and Apple. But amid concerns about privacy and criticism of technology issues, troublemakers complained that applications were launched too late in the pandemic — when the number of cases was too high for technologies to reverse the tide.

So shouldn’t this moment in the UK (when technical issues have been resolved, when adoption is high and with the rise of new waves) not be the right time for its applications to make a real difference?

If people don’t voluntarily follow the instructions to isolate themselves, says Jenny Wanger, who leads technology initiatives related to Covid for the Linux Public Health Foundation.

Eighteen months into the pandemic, “technology is not usually a challenge,” he says. “Science isn’t so much a challenge … we know, right now, how covert transmissions work. The challenge comes down to behavior. The hardest parts of the system are the parts you need to convince people to do something, of course, based on good practice.”

Oxford Fraser says he thinks in terms of incentives. The average person believes that incentives to comply with contact tracking rules (digital or otherwise) are not always added.

The result of using the app is “if you end up in quarantine but the neighbor who didn’t install the app isn’t quarantined,” he says, “that’s not necessarily fair, is it?”