Me on Covid-19 contact tracing apps
&gt; [...] and Bluetooth -- just aren&#x27;t accurate enough to capture every contact.<p>Did I miss his paper on the matter? There&#x27;s dozens of groups working on this and even with a regular free space model the results seem &quot;good enough&quot; in &lt;2m,15min scenarios for an additional data point.<p>Most of this seems to leave out that digital contact tracing is not a cure all but a tool to help manual efforts. I somewhat hate the simplification people bring here, that every additional identified contact helps, but dismissing it as &quot;plain dumb&quot; seems rather shallow as well. Sure, false negatives will be a thing, the false negative rate of not doing digital contact tracing at all would be higher by definition. Most of what he outlined can occur in manual contact tracing as well and we still do that, simply because it&#x27;s necessary.<p>I haven&#x27;t seen anything so far that would suggest that digital contact tracing in the poster child Singapore had any of the negative impact he brings to the table here and studies like Ferretti et al. [0] seem to make a pretty good case why it would at least not hurt the overall epidemiological goal.<p>&gt;  It&#x27;s not accurate enough for you to quarantine yourself for two weeks. And without ubiquitous, cheap, fast, and accurate testing, you can&#x27;t confirm the app&#x27;s diagnosis. So the alert is useless.<p>The time frame and assumptions on testing capability is US centric I assume? If you can get a quick test it would not be two weeks, it&#x27;s likely quick tests will become more prevalent if this sticks around long enough and testing capability will be raised to sufficient levels. Otherwise yes, false positives would quickly diminish usage.<p>Of course some of his points are valid and need to be addressed by OS vendors, apps and policy makers, and evaluation of efficacy will be just as critical as teaching the public that having an app does not mean things can go back to normal. There&#x27;s also plenty of opportunity for abuse even with the commonly decentralized architecture that is at the moment widely agreed upon but none of that supports the allegations of this particular article imho.<p>The comments similarly bring up things like &quot;surface transmission&quot; as if that mattered at all. If you treat a contact tracing app as an additional data point it becomes much more sensible.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.sciencemag.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;early&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;09&#x2F;science.abb6936" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.sciencemag.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;early&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;09&#x2F;scie...</a>