
Don’t rely on contact-tracing apps - dotcoma
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/05/16/dont-rely-on-contact-tracing-apps
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jonahbenton
[http://archive.is/sJLP3](http://archive.is/sJLP3)

Unusually confused piece for the Economist, which says govts should not rely
on contact tracing apps as silver bullet, as the apps can have incomplete
participation, leading to mistaken/dangerous conclusions, plus they give more
power to the tech giants. However, it concludes with

"In this case, though, Google’s and Apple’s cautious approach is sensible. In
a pandemic, experimenting with novel public-health responses such as mass
surveillance should be done carefully...."

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keenmaster
Agreed. It’s like when you get an essay prompt in high school English that
asks a binary question but you want to be a contrarian so you don’t take
either side of the issue and end up presenting some garbled middle ground.

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LatteLazy
The management of this pandemic, both here in the UK and in the US, has been
appallingly poor. We're months in and we still don't really know all the
symptoms or the various R values or the mortality rates. It's actually insane
how badly we've done.

~~~
jonahbenton
This will be downvoted but- in the US, on a national level, "poor management"
is a deliberate choice.

The chaos that stems from absence of leadership suits the Chaos Monkey
President. Like all grifter/carnival barkers, he despises his customers
(marks), whose only option in the absence of information, support, structure,
is YOLO, and who will therefore ultimately suffer the most, while continuing
to turn to him for his cynical false messaging and identification of an Other
to blame for any misfortune.

Those who are not under his spell are beaten into apathy by the sheer
unrelenting awfulness and the absence of an alternative national strategy
other than "vote in November."

Even states/regions (like mine, NY) where there is less insulation for
incompetent or malignant leadership than at the national level and that are
finally proceeding rationally and relatively transparently nevertheless failed
to act quickly enough at the start, and continue to be presented with
grotesque and criminal obstacles by the national government.

It is an appalling state of insanity that we are in, that's for sure.

~~~
cabaalis
The US health system is not well positioned for command-and-control from a
centralized source. This has various advantages and disadvantages, but is a
severe hindrance in a pandemic.

There wasn't even a unified diagnosis code for COVID until April 1, and that
required a herculean effort and a shirking of normal coding update processes.
There were various guidances for coding, but identifying diagnosis in
structured data for fast analysis was a difficult ask. (I know this to be
true, I've done it across the health records of millions of patients.)

I'm sure some fault lies in the administration, but my belief is that our
health system is systemically unable to properly deal with widespread
pandemic, especially from a newly discovered illness.

That's one of those trade-offs that have to be considered when looking at how
health care in the US should be handled in the future.

~~~
nradov
Are you referring to ICD-10 code U07.01? I thought the US had to wait for the
WHO to add the code, so I'm not clear on how our health system was worse than
other countries in that respect.

[https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/icd10updates/en/](https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/icd10updates/en/)

~~~
cabaalis
Yes, U07.1. I was not aware of the WHO aspect (only that it had to be
accelerated.) Prior to April 1 there were several CDC guidances for covid that
unfortunately were complicated by existing code re-use.

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ryeights
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200515102107/https://www.econo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200515102107/https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/05/16/dont-
rely-on-contact-tracing-apps)

~~~
daphneokeefe
that archive link is also paywalled

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ryeights
Huh. I didn't know logins worked on archive.org

