
UK virus-tracing app switches to Google-Apple model - csmattryder
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53095336
======
djaychela
I wonder how this will go down with Palantir and Faculty - I can't imagine
this was in their game plan.

I'm in the UK and I've almost given up on watching the news as it seems every
step taken by the government is weeks behind where it should be, and taken in
a reactive way, rather than there being any kind of proactive, coordinated
response to the crisis. This is welcome, but months behind when it should have
happened - plenty of discussion on here said the route they were trying to
take wouldn't work for technical reasons, aside from one's of privacy.

By the time this is up and running, it'll be irrelevant.

~~~
rezeroed
The whole thing is political (the two party system is a disaster). I don't
think Boris wanted lock down or any other curbs on freedom - that's not in his
character. I expect he would have preferred the Swedish approach, but he's
trying to win over the left, which is fairly futile because they'll always
find something to shout at him about.

~~~
jen20
The mistake you are making in this comment is assuming Boris Johnson has _any
principles at all_ despite every piece of evidence being to the contrary, and
every action he has ever taken in his career (and apparently also in his
personal life) indicating that the only constant is doing whatever is
necessary to maintain or increase power regardless of consequence.

(Yes, I’m British, though I don’t live there any more).

~~~
rezeroed
I didn't call them principles. I'd call them preferences, tendencies, or
character

~~~
jen20
In that case, I'd assume his preference would have been to do absolutely
nothing, and let millions die as a way to reduce the costs of the welfare
state.

His tendencies and character do a good job of enlightening us as to his lack
of principles.

If you think that "lockdown" was to appease the left (who tend to be younger
and healthier) rather than the core Conservative vote (the overwhelmingly
older, less healthy, more-at-risk-from-COVID group), I don't know what to tell
you.

~~~
rezeroed
`who tend to be younger and healthier` - your hindsight reasoning, not theirs,
and not at the time.

~~~
jen20
With an 80 seat majority barely four months old (at the time) why exactly do
you think Johnson would care about appeasing the opposition?

------
plantain
I just don't understand how the UK, a modern first world democracy, can be
quite so far behind every other country. They're still debating a quarantine
for new arrivals, contact tracing is yet to really start, testing lagged
significantly...

It's an island nation, it should have had a head-and-shoulders advantage over
continental Europe with full potential for an outcome closer to New Zealand or
Australia rather than the US or Brazil.

What went wrong?

~~~
g_p
The quarantine for new arrivals has been in effect for 10 days [1].

Contact tracing was launched on 28th May [2].

It seems to me that what went wrong was a large number of UK residents were
overseas in February/March (sspecially on ski breaks) to Italy, France and
other mainland Europe destinations. The Government didn't impose any emergency
isolation or quarantine on those arriving, as was the case for those arriving
on repatriation flights from Hubei and other Chinese destinations.

Given much of the scientific analysis of the virus points to strains being
descended from those in mainland Europe, it seems a key reason the UK wasn't
"head and shoulders" ahead was the scale of this international leisure travel
to countries that ended up most affected. Had those returning been put into
quarantine, there might have been a very different outcome, but it's hard to
say for sure.

[1]
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52774854](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52774854)

[2]
[https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/893172/test_and_trace_bulletin_week_2_28_may_to_10_june.pdf)

~~~
culturestate
> The quarantine for new arrivals has been in effect for 10 days

Given how effective arrival quarantines have been elsewhere (TW, NZ, SG, et
al) and how long they’ve been in effect it’s frankly insane that the UK took
this long to implement it.

~~~
g_p
I agree entirely here. In fact I know people at the time jumping up and down
and saying "apply the Wuhan quarantine rules to everyone arriving from
mainland Europe in general, or indeed anywhere".

The key to me seems to have been that measures were put in place slowly, at
the pace ministers move at, rather than the pace experts can make decisions
at. Asking everyone who returned to quarantine for 7 days would clearly have
helped, with the benefit of hindsight.

I think the issue is that politicians tend to want to avoid imposing what are
seen as invasive measures where they feel the risk is low. Their assessment of
the level of risk posed by those returning from overseas holidays in February
was clearly now, in the cold light of day, very poor.

The sheer number of people overseas at the time probably didn't help matters -
some suggestions that as many as 1 million people were overseas at the time
[1].

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/uk-battling-
to...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/uk-battling-to-
repatriate-hundreds-of-thousands-of-britons-says-dominic-raab-coronavrus)

~~~
nicoburns
> Their assessment of the level of risk posed by those returning from overseas
> holidays in February was clearly now, in the cold light of day, very poor.

Frankly, it was clearly very poor even then. That they didn't realise that
reflects poorly on them.

------
jonplackett
This is just yet another case of the UK government insisting they know best,
continuing down a stupid path despite watching everyone else successfully
walking the opposite direction. From locking down late, to stopping contact
tracing early, to not mass-testing, to releasing infected people into care
homes. Just pure arrogance / incompetence.

(I'm British in case you wondered... sigh...)

~~~
pmlnr
I voluntarily live in the UK as an EU citizen. Most countries have faults,
these are the British faults. Germany won't act without a manual to follow, in
Hungary you need direct permission from the maffia (also known as the
governing party); choose your poison.

~~~
futurix
Well, the difference is that German manual tends to work in the end. Certainly
worked for Coronavirus (so far).

~~~
johannes1234321
Mind that Germany went towards a centralized non-Apple- Google solution first
(PEPP-PT) They just took the turn sooner than the British and others.

~~~
BillyTheKing
tbf, everyone went for their own custom solution initially since apple/google
only really announced their plans for a joined effort some time early/mid
April or so

~~~
votepaunchy
The decision to centralize the data collection was not due to a lack of a
privacy-preserving API. Any country could have gone this route independent of
Apple and Google.

------
mattlondon
This is a win for privacy - the previous model used a centralised "anonymous"
database, with the idea being that the data could then be mined for various
purposes officially relating to spotting outbreaks and the like. Obviously,
this sounds very big-brothery since it would have been a database of who was
where with who and when etc.

Not sure if this sudden outbreak of common sense was due to either:

a) technical difficulties of doing something hacky with iOS to try and make
the background bluetooth approach work or implementing the backend,

b) something else usurping the need for the data mining (e.g. perhaps the
much-trumpeted track-and-trace system where people self-report/voluntarily
tell the government who they spend time with)

c) actually caring about people's privacy.

Probably a combination of a + b I expect. c feels like a longshot.

~~~
tomatocracy
You could also add the potential that the pilot on the Isle of Wight led them
to believe that app-based contact tracing is not really very helpful anyway.

------
zpeti
UK government seems to be behind everyone else on every policy decision on
coronavirus.

Win for privacy.

~~~
Traster
That's what you get when you put fairly incompetent people in positions of
power because they align with your political views. All the way back to having
political advisors sitting on the "Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies"
the first question has been about the politics of policy rather than efficacy.

~~~
arethuza
Someone who is currently a cabinet minister did memorably say:

 _" I think the people in this country have had enough of experts"_

~~~
timthorn
The full quote continues: "...from organisations with acronyms saying they
know what is best, and getting it consistently wrong."

~~~
faemir
...while trying to peddle absolute economic lies, which were called out by the
independent UK statistical authority as misleading. In the same breath also
lying about him not running a candidacy to be PM, declining to name any
figures backing his assertions.

What are you trying to say?

~~~
lambdadmitry
That the quote is taken out of context, I guess. Other factors that you've
mentioned don't change the fact.

~~~
arethuza
HMG is also an acronym!

------
JoeSmithson
The government had already basically eaten the bad press on the privacy
aspects of their design vs the Google/Apple API... I wonder what prompted
this.

I know that the app used a kind of hack to allow for Bluetooth during sleep
(something missing from the Aus app) - maybe they were told that was going to
be patched out?

I really think this must be related to it not working as intended rather than
anything political.

~~~
g_p
The UK "hack" for the bluetooth was quite clever from what I saw - in essence
they implemented the "background discovery of an iPhone" feature.

One concern I do have with this approach is that the decentralised system
inherently can only model the "risk-to" an individual from an epidemiological
perspective. It can't model the "risk-from" side of things. To avoid Sybil
type attacks, you need to use centrally issued (and thus verifiable) test
results to notify others.

Unless tests are administered very promptly, with results immediately
available, it seems difficult to make this work in the decentralised approach
- with a mean and median "time to symptoms" of around 5.1 days [1], and
someone at their most infectious for the 1 to 2 days prior to experiencing
symptoms, it seems decentralised apps will struggle.

If A is infected on day 0, then on day 3 they may infect B and C. On day 5, A
experiences symptoms, goes online, and requests a test, saying they have
symptoms. They realistically would get a test the following day. and the
result the day after that. That would be day 7, and at that point, B and C
might be notified by the app. The issue is that B and C are now on day 4 of
their own infections, the second day of their most infectious period, walking
around unaware. They find out the day before they would themselves (on
average) experience symptoms.

Clearly the virus is not as deterministic in behaviour as in this simple
model, but the above seems to suggest to me that to get any real value out of
this (i.e. preventing the next generation of infection), you need to either be
able to respond to symptoms reports, or significantly expedite the testing
process. In the above situation, a same-day test-and-result would enable B and
C to be notified on day 2 or early on day 3 of their own infection,
potentially having some real impact. But to achieve this, the latency of
testing would need to drop hugely.

[1] [https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/03/09/coronavirus-incubation-
period...](https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/03/09/coronavirus-incubation-period/)

~~~
ppf
Exactly what I was thinking - I don't see how this approach will work in
practice with the time it takes to find and positively identify a Covid-19
case, as the chain of contacts will become enormous.

~~~
g_p
If the clinical results of the 20-minute lab-free test the UK is trialling [1]
are positive, I could see this working. But that's a risk.

To my mind, this is a simple matter of reducing the time the "next generation"
of infected people are in the community before being notified. If that can be
below 3 days, I think the disease can be managed based on the law of averages.
If not, it seems it will continue to spread.

That's why, absent a national "Amazon Prime Now" style <= 2 hour delivery
window for tests (and some way to verify the results of these tests for input
to a decentralised app), I don't see this working.

The app will only really be needed/helpful in cases where you don't know
people you are in close or prolonged proximity to, i.e. shops and public
transport. In these cases, it makes sense to notify as early as possible, even
at the risk of some false positives for those not actually infected, but who
were close. The question is how many FPs there will be, but this also happens
with human-based contact tracing too.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/21/uk-
coronavirus...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/21/uk-coronavirus-
test-with-20-minute-wait-being-trialled)

------
zspitzer
Is the UK app also geo-blocked to only UK based Apple/google Accounts like the
new German app?

[https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-app-
android/issues/47...](https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-app-
android/issues/478)

~~~
bbx
This triggers the question: why is the app not available worldwide in the
first place? And why should every country develop their own? Since Apple and
Google are already providing an "Exposure Notification system", shouldn't such
an app be distributed natively (i.e. not through a geo-blocked app store),
like the Phone or Compass apps? I understand this would mean the app should be
developed, or at least released, by Apple and Google directly. But since
they're already helping out with the notification system, we're halfway there.
I also understand there are lots of legal and regulatory implications for
having a worldwide app, but I feel like we're past this point already.

Sorry if I'm sounding naive, but people are going to start traveling again, so
limiting a tracing app to a country's borders seems arbitrarily inefficient to
say the least.

~~~
majewsky
The hard part isn't building the app, the hard part is integrating with the
health administrations in every country. In Germany alone, there are nearly
400 county health administration offices to interface with.

------
JamesBaxter
Is this the real reason why the app seemed like it was suddenly going to be
delayed?

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53083340](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53083340)

------
jjgreen
I can't see Palantir being happy about that.

~~~
noir_lord
To me that makes it very much a double win.

Palantir of all people shouldn't have been anywhere near the NHS in the first
place.

------
prepend
“ And questions remain about whether any smartphone-based system reliant on
Bluetooth signals will be accurate enough to be useful”

This is the biggest question for me. I’m interested in the actual public
health usefulness.

------
toyg
This is a lot of noise about something that, unless it is made compulsory as
some Asian countries have done, will likely end up like the Norwegian effort:
2% install rate and hence useless.

------
Mvandenbergh
I think they were right to try for an ambitious model that tried to do things
that the Google-Apple model didn't.

I also think they should have developed two apps in parallel from the
beginning. It would hardly have cost much more when you consider the benefits
and it would mean that the decision to move from one to the other could be
made immediately. (I know they've been working on a Google/Apple one but not
sure how much work has gone into it.)

------
mytailorisrich
The centralised approach is 'better' for the stated aims but it is harder to
reliably develop.

I suspect that they concluded that the whole system won't be ready soon enough
(ideally it should have been deployed by now) and so they are switching to
something they can deploy faster.

In any case I suspect that these apps will make very little difference because
they will come too late, not be used widely enough, and provide too little
actionable data.

------
jonnypotty
Why does everyone seem to think coronavirus death stats are like a score of
how well your government is doing in response to the pandemic. If you didn't
manage to stop the virus entering your country, which you can't without
destroying international travel and your economy, then the end game is 60-70
percent of your population having had it. As long as people aren't dying in
your country due to lack of medical care then you've not done too bad right?

We cannot avoid most people contracting this virus so why are people keeping
running totals of deaths as a score card? I guess we like the idea that we
could have stopped it and it gives us a sense of control and something to rage
against.

The UK government is estimating that 1/1000 people have had it already. If
true that means our final death toll could be in the millions right? we don't
talk about that thou, we just say, lockdown should have happened a week
earlier! We could have saved 2000 lives. Ok, is that 2000 lives OVERALL, like
final figures or is it just 2000 lives by this point?

And the idea that it's just the UK government... 1/6 people said they'd ignore
the governments advise on face coverings on public transport. Basically the UK
is a load of raging, entitled children for the most part, we don't want to
sacrifice anything and we want other people to fix things for us... Cos it's
"their job"

~~~
formatjam
No. look at China and Korea. It can be well controlled. Business has been
reopened with little new cases.

~~~
vonmoltke
China has been going through cycles of partially reopening followed by
regional lockdowns when flare-ups happen. They are nowhere near "reopened".

South Korea is one of the poster children for "manage to stop the virus
entering your country". They have been aggressively responding to each and
every case because they are able to identify each case that enters the
country. Even then, they are still not fully "reopened".

I agree that neither has reached the level of "destroying international travel
and your economy", but let's not understate the impact that their measures
_are_ having either.

------
_Wintermute
These comments have the expected pessimism from anything UK related, but after
watching the disaster of France's home-grown centralised app this seems like a
smart choice.

------
mattlondon
Interesting comment from the BBC article that I had not thought about before:

> "make the app compatible with other countries' counterparts, which are based
> on the same system "

So if multiple countries are using the Apple-Google system, we'll have an
international system that anyone can use? I guess this bodes well for future
international travel over the next 12/18 months (... or until the vaccines etc
are ready) since we'd still get the benefits if we are in compatible
countries.

~~~
Mindwipe
They aren't international by default, but enabling (opt in by the developer)
interoperability is on the Google/Apple roadmap.

It would be difficult to see how that would ever happen for an app not using
the APIs.

------
underdeserver
So Germany and the UK, right? Any other countries using this already?
Preliminary data?

~~~
toyg
FTA: "The UK follows Germany, Italy and Denmark among others"

Also: " the European Commission said that France - which had adopted a
centralised app - would face challenges in this regard."

I think we will inevitably see most developed countries falling in line. On
the other hand, I expect the likes of Hungary to go "centralized".

------
Mvandenbergh
There is an interesting discussion to be had about contact tracing apps and
choice of model, most of the internet and all of the press will not be having
it.

(Ill informed and barely remembered fragments that somehow Palantir / Cummings
/ Satan's niece was involved in this app are nonsense. Palantir is doing some
internal data vis work and both apps are being built by the same team anyway)

The first thing to consider is whether this has led to a real delay in roll-
out. We don't know that so far, but we do know that they actually started work
on an app based on the Google-Apple API more than a month ago and very few
countries have done a full roll-out of an app based on that API yet (and those
quite recently). We also know that these approaches work better after "full
lockdown" because during the lockdown contacts are already massively
suppressed. If it hasn't led to a delay, then the inevitable wailing and
gnashing of teeth will be completely irrelevant. Optionality is good, the more
things tried the better.

The second is to acknowledge that one of the issues with the (very good idea)
of partially or wholly anonymous contact tracing is that apparently people
don't like receiving this news from an app interface. That makes an app which
interfaces which the rest of the contact tracing system like the one that NHSX
originally built a better bet.

The third is to realise that there is as yet no evidence that these solutions
work at all. We know that fully centralised contact tracing (which includes a
geolocation tracking app) works in Asia. Nobody knows if either the fully
decentralised DP-3T system developed by Apple/Google or the partially
decentralised PEPP-PT/Robert system developed by NHSX will works.

The fourth is that if you can make it work around phone OS restrictions, there
are very real advantages to the NHSX original design which simply cannot be
replicated with a fully decentralised system.

There are two which are particularly noteworthy.

First, you can extract aggregated local infection data from the NHSX system
which can drive granular local lockdowns.

Second, rather more significantly, because of the central control element, you
can revoke notifications. That's important because revokeable notifications
allows you to take the risk of allowing some notifications based on symptom
onset before a test has been conducted. Since the peak transmission window is
around symptom onset and the incubation period is short, notifying early has
very significant advantages. People will be irritated if they get a
notification which is revoked 24 hours later and you do have to consider the
behavioural elements but it is a useful capability to have.

You can also do exposure cohorting. If person A had 10 contacts in a three
hour period and on day 8 after exposure none have developed symptoms, you may
consider releasing them all from quarantine early. This requires developing
quite a sophisticated risk model and carefully weighing up the tradeoffs - you
may decide not to use it - but it is an extremely powerful thing to be able to
do.

It has never been the case that the Google/Apple solution is "obviously
better". Rather there are complex tradeoffs to be considered between different
solutions. It would be one thing if we had data to show that the Google/Apple
supported solution worked brilliantly. That would mean that the additional
features the NHSX design has are not required and therefore the privacy
tradeoff is not worth it. We don't though, we know that the a fully
centralised panopticon nightmare system works in South Korea and China and we
know that we don't want that.

(edit: obviously if they can't make their own app because of Bluetooth issues
then the whole game ends and they have to switch)

(edit 2: it was apparently due to technical issues that they were not able to
resolve. In denser areas the keepalive mechanism they built works well and
keeps most iphones and androids visible for long periods of time but if you go
through a period of not being around other phones, too many will drop out.
Note that Bluetooth is an inherently challenging way of mapping distance and
that this applies to any app which uses it)

------
amcoastal
Or just don't download an app that is entirely useless in practice while being
extremely problematic in many ways...

------
NCG_Mike
Good. The NHS has a terrible history of software development.

~~~
robin_reala
Leaving the app to one side, NHS Digital has been doing good stuff for the
last couple of years: [https://digital.nhs.uk/](https://digital.nhs.uk/)

~~~
Mindwipe
They do, and there were good people working on this.

That said, my suspicion is that they have good track records of working with
open web stacks, and were somewhat less familiar with the realities of working
with closed app platforms that relate to hardware integration, and that's
where they came unstuck.

