Is the Government's contact tracing system effective and worthwhile?

[edwin_m]

Moderator note: Split from

Has Boris and the government done a good job of handling the pandemic?

A few weeks ago, there were posts on social media supporting Boris and suggesting he and his team deserved support for all the work they’d put in to handle the COVID-19 pandemic. I contend he’ and his cabinet have done an abysmal job, and offer the following as evidence: * Many experts believe...

www.railforums.co.uk

Precisely; and this is exactly the root cause of most of the problems we now face.

We had decided as a nation to adopt an approach of natural herd immunity, which is an effective approach provided that you shield away those who are most vulnerable and likely to die from the virus (ie care homes locked down, those who are currently shielding would have been advised to do so). We didn't do this effectively enough and the virus spread through the vulnerable quickly meaning that, in order to prevent any risk of the NHS being overwhelmed, we had no choice but to enter a national lockdown.

The purpose of the lockdown was achieved weeks ago, and now the government have lost sight of what they're trying to achieve. As I've stated many times now, establishing herd immunity is quite literally the only way out of the pandemic now. The first steps taken by the government were somewhat logical provided that we were planning to follow the herd immunity approach, however, we seem to now have our hearts set on eliminating the virus, which due to the high number of cases in all settings across the country, is simply impossible. The government need to, quite frankly, open their eyes and start to plan on how to best go about achieving herd immunity on the presumption that we may never get a vaccine, as this current approach of pretending to ourselves we can eliminate the virus in order to convince the public that we're 'safe' is just immature and pointless and is causing serious damage to the economy, our mental health, the education of our children, and many other aspects of society.

Several posters on here are ignoring the existence of a different approach, getting the numbers down low enough that a properly-organized track and trace system can deal with individual cases and quarantine their contacts. You may disagree with it (I myself don't believe it is workable in the UK as we currently stand) but why is nobody even responding to the suggestion?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Several posters on here are ignoring the existence of a different approach, getting the numbers down low enough that a properly-organized track and trace system can deal with individual cases and quarantine their contacts. You may disagree with it (I myself don't believe it is workable in the UK as we currently stand) but why is nobody even responding to the suggestion?

Because I don't believe the Government are competent enough to set that up, primarily. The contact tracing system we have is "tell us who your mates are and we'll ring them for you" - absolutely worthless. True contact tracing has to be investigative and invasive - what they want to find is the person who sat next to you on the bus, the person who served you in the local shop when you got a bit close, the person you had an affair with (!) etc - you have to investigate each person to the extent you would investigate a terrorist. If you don't, what's the point? The upside of the phone tracing app is that it would do a lot of that anonymously, but it seems they can't even manage that, not even with Germany having open-sourced theirs so they could literally just take it and deploy it as is with a bit of translation of the text.

(note: edited to remove the bit on care homes which I will put back in the other thread)

 

[northernchris]

Because I don't believe the Government are competent enough to set that up, primarily. The contact tracing system we have is "tell us who your mates are and we'll ring them for you" - absolutely worthless. True contact tracing has to be investigative and invasive - what they want to find is the person who sat next to you on the bus, the person who served you in the local shop when you got a bit close, the person you had an affair with (!) etc - you have to investigate each person to the extent you would investigate a terrorist. If you don't, what's the point? The upside of the phone tracing app is that it would do a lot of that anonymously, but it seems they can't even manage that, not even with Germany having open-sourced theirs so they could literally just take it and deploy it as is with a bit of translation of the text.

Yeah, the current system isn't the best, but the evidence suggests you need to have close contact for 15 minutes or more to catch the virus. So being served in a shop by a member of staff who tested positive or passing in the aisle or street probably wouldn't warrant investigating. Perhaps temperature checks could be used in addition to tracing, it wouldn't work everywhere but could be useful in workplaces and potentially pubs, restaurants, hotels and theatres.

 

[takno]

Several posters on here are ignoring the existence of a different approach, getting the numbers down low enough that a properly-organized track and trace system can deal with individual cases and quarantine their contacts. You may disagree with it (I myself don't believe it is workable in the UK as we currently stand) but why is nobody even responding to the suggestion?

It's unlikely to work without a fairly hefty level of social distancing and closed borders, and that would have to keep going indefinitely. Even with the social distancing there's still a risk of an outbreak going beyond the ability of the tracers to control.

Primarily though, everybody has quietly stopped talking about it because outside of South Korea it doesn't seem to have proved as useful as people perhaps anticipated a couple of months ago.

 

[Domh245]

Several posters on here are ignoring the existence of a different approach, getting the numbers down low enough that a properly-organized track and trace system can deal with individual cases and quarantine their contacts. You may disagree with it (I myself don't believe it is workable in the UK as we currently stand) but why is nobody even responding to the suggestion?

Apart from the concerns raised by the others about the effectiveness of the track & trace system in the first place, such a method is also reliant on the number of cases being small enough to be manageable. The opportunity to use this method passed before we went into lockdown, unless you were willing to hold lockdown at it's strongest 'setting' (or stronger) for a longer period of time than we did.

 

[Jozhua]

Boris Johnson was slow to take us into lockdown. On March 16th he encouraged home working and avoiding public transport if possible. On March 20th he ordered bars to close. Then finally on the evening of March 23rd he introduced the lockdown.

By then, the open borders with lack of quarantine, testing etc had enabled a considerable spread of Coronavirus. Sending non-fully recovered patients (even from other conditions) without Coronavirus tests back to care homes exacerbated the spread too.

Actually cannot believe the borders were left open without quarantine. Being an island nation, we could have definately shielded ourselves better, or at least delayed and slowed the spread more effectively and less harmfully than we saw with lockdown.

Precisely; and this is exactly the root cause of most of the problems we now face.

We had decided as a nation to adopt an approach of natural herd immunity, which is an effective approach provided that you shield away those who are most vulnerable and likely to die from the virus (ie care homes locked down, those who are currently shielding would have been advised to do so). We didn't do this effectively enough and the virus spread through the vulnerable quickly meaning that, in order to prevent any risk of the NHS being overwhelmed, we had no choice but to enter a national lockdown.

The purpose of the lockdown was achieved weeks ago, and now the government have lost sight of what they're trying to achieve. As I've stated many times now, establishing herd immunity is quite literally the only way out of the pandemic now. The first steps taken by the government were somewhat logical provided that we were planning to follow the herd immunity approach, however, we seem to now have our hearts set on eliminating the virus, which due to the high number of cases in all settings across the country, is simply impossible. The government need to, quite frankly, open their eyes and start to plan on how to best go about achieving herd immunity on the presumption that we may never get a vaccine, as this current approach of pretending to ourselves we can eliminate the virus in order to convince the public that we're 'safe' is just immature and pointless and is causing serious damage to the economy, our mental health, the education of our children, and many other aspects of society.

I agree totally, this is my opinion too.

Several posters on here are ignoring the existence of a different approach, getting the numbers down low enough that a properly-organized track and trace system can deal with individual cases and quarantine their contacts. You may disagree with it (I myself don't believe it is workable in the UK as we currently stand) but why is nobody even responding to the suggestion?

"Properly Organised"... You're in the wrong country for that my friend

If instead you're looking for some underpaid people on a laptop scrolling through your tagged Instagram photos, that's more accurate.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Yeah, the current system isn't the best, but the evidence suggests you need to have close contact for 15 minutes or more to catch the virus. So being served in a shop by a member of staff who tested positive or passing in the aisle or street probably wouldn't warrant investigating. Perhaps temperature checks could be used in addition to tracing, it wouldn't work everywhere but could be useful in workplaces and potentially pubs, restaurants, hotels and theatres.

The criteria they seem to be using (though I forget where I read it) is "within 2m for 15 minutes or more, or within 1m more briefly but not fleetingly". So if you were a bit close to a cashier in a supermarket who didn't have a screen up nor a mask and had a conversation with them (which tends to project the virus a bit), that could well trigger it. Similarly with a work colleague in a meeting room, say, or if you shared a car with someone. In the latter case you'd know who it was, of course, but if it was a minicab type taxi that's another one you'd need to track down, while you'd be more than 1m away if in the rear offside seat (or better, the back row of a 7 seater), you're still in a small, shared airspace. Hackney carriages less so as they have proper screens, and they could block the "cash hole" and you pay when you get out through the driver's window, as many Londoners do anyway.

So there is a lot more to check than "who are your mates/work colleagues who you could just tell yourself and would do unless you're the sort of person who would also lie to the contact tracers" as it seems they are doing.

 

[edwin_m]

Apart from the concerns raised by the others about the effectiveness of the track & trace system in the first place, such a method is also reliant on the number of cases being small enough to be manageable. The opportunity to use this method passed before we went into lockdown, unless you were willing to hold lockdown at it's strongest 'setting' (or stronger) for a longer period of time than we did.

"Properly Organised"... You're in the wrong country for that my friend

OK, so you're both saying that we can't drive figures low enough for track and trace to manage. I can see that point of view and I may come round to it. And it means the consequences of the government's incompetence haven't yet finished, as if we don't get a vaccine there is a risk of having to go through second or third waves as the only way out.

 

[jfollows]

I don't believe that it would be impossible to implement a workable track/trace/isolate system, but not with this government and especially not with a central call centre approach. Empowering and funding local authorities to implement the system would be necessary, but whether or not it would be sufficient I am less sure about.

 

[Bletchleyite]

OK, so you're both saying that we can't drive figures low enough for track and trace to manage. I can see that point of view and I may come round to it. And it means the consequences of the government's incompetence haven't yet finished, as if we don't get a vaccine there is a risk of having to go through second or third waves as the only way out.

I think with these numbers the app could work quite well. It doesn't have to be perfect, and indeed if all it did was ask people to have a test rather than imprison them for 14 days it might be good enough (not as good due to false negatives, but like with most things[1] it needn't be perfect, just good enough). The German version is fully open source (and they've already done the testing) so a couple of days' translation work and changing the icon for something with NHS on it (to get the buy-in) and we could have it released. Cost maybe a few thousand?

I still wish Apple/Google had done it themselves, taking the Governments out of the argument completely. Maybe they will now the API is complete.

[1] E-tickets, and the view in here and elsewhere that they needed to be 100% secure (which led to the appallingly designed M-ticket technology), rather than just "not substantially less secure than paper tickets", is a good example.

 

[northernchris]

The criteria they seem to be using (though I forget where I read it) is "within 2m for 15 minutes or more, or within 1m more briefly but not fleetingly". So if you were a bit close to a cashier in a supermarket who didn't have a screen up nor a mask and had a conversation with them (which tends to project the virus a bit), that could well trigger it. Similarly with a work colleague in a meeting room, say, or if you shared a car with someone. In the latter case you'd know who it was, of course, but if it was a minicab type taxi that's another one you'd need to track down, while you'd be more than 1m away if in the rear offside seat (or better, the back row of a 7 seater), you're still in a small, shared airspace. Hackney carriages less so as they have proper screens, and they could block the "cash hole" and you pay when you get out through the driver's window, as many Londoners do anyway.

So there is a lot more to check than "who are your mates/work colleagues who you could just tell yourself and would do unless you're the sort of person who would also lie to the contact tracers" as it seems they are doing.

From experience most if not all major stores now have screens up at the checkouts which should help to reduce the risks for both staff and customers. As for those who either provide false information or don't co-operate with the tracers this needs to be made in to an offence. Everyone has a part to play in reducing the spread of the virus, and we can blame the government as much as we like, but processes are flawed if the public don't obey

 

[Bletchleyite]

From experience most if not all major stores now have screens up at the checkouts which should help to reduce the risks for both staff and customers. As for those who either provide false information or don't co-operate with the tracers this needs to be made in to an offence.

There is no point having offences that are not enforceable. It would require armies of CCTV viewers and far better CCTV than it often is to find out that I'd simply not told you about, e.g., having been in the home of someone I was having an affair with. And if you're going to do that, why not just contact trace that way and not bother asking?

You might be able to tell from ANPR that I'd been to the right town, and from cell locate on my phone that I'd been on the right street, but that isn't enough evidence for "beyond reasonable doubt". After all, a car parked on the pavement is not enough evidence to prove "beyond reasonable doubt" that it was driven there (which is an offence), because it could have been pushed (which isn't)!

 

[Tetchytyke]

The UK was originally well ahead of the curve on the test-trace-track system of control. People who tested positive in this country were told to isolate, their contacts were traced, and others who came in were held in isolation in hospitals such as Arrowe Park in rural Birkenhead. I know the system worked because my ex's sister caught Covid on a skiing trip in Italy early February and I know how the whole family were contacted and isolated, including my daughter who also went on that skiing trip.

But the UK let go of it all, they switched to "herd immunity" without any idea of how to reach that goal. And look what the result was.

That is what is so frustrating about all of this. The UK were quietly going about this in a quietly efficient and sensible way, and then something changed in government. It changed about the time that Dominic Cummings was (if you believe The Sunday Times- I do, as it's a Murdoch paper commenting on a Tory government) saying in meetings that there should be no steps taken to control the virus and "if some pensioners die that's too bad". It was when these quietly efficient systems were disbanded that the ordue hit the ventilation device.

As for those who either provide false information or don't co-operate with the tracers this needs to be made in to an offence.

Interesting you go straight for the authoritarian approach. I'd say a test-track-trace system would have much more engagement if people could trust it. Sadly, thanks to The Boris doling out the contracts to his mates without tender or commercial scrutiny, the whole system is fundamentally untrustworthy. I wouldn't believe a Serco call centre worker if they told me today was Sunday. Serco's CEO, Rupert Soames (Churchill's grandson, fact fans), is a former Bullingdon Club member and brother of a former Tory minister, and Serco are generous donors to the Tory Party (when they're not detaining immigrants unlawfully, employing call centre staff to hand out breast cancer advice based on one hour's training and a "cheat sheet", or being fined £23m for overcharging on electronic tagging contracts).

As for the app that cost £11m and doesn't work, it was partly developed by Faculty AI, a company controlled by Cummings' mate Marc Warner (whose brother Ben is a senior No10 adviser, of course) and who was heavily linked to the most egregious privacy issues of the Vote Leave campaign. People won't engage with something that is so fundamentally untrustworthy.

So we have £108m of public money handed out to Rupert Soames and Marc Warner, without any scrutiny, and people can't understand why the tracing scheme isn't trusted!

 

[Llanigraham]

From experience most if not all major stores now have screens up at the checkouts which should help to reduce the risks for both staff and customers. As for those who either provide false information or don't co-operate with the tracers this needs to be made in to an offence. Everyone has a part to play in reducing the spread of the virus, and we can blame the government as much as we like, but processes are flawed if the public don't obey

You can't make it an offence if there is no legislation in place to force people to have the means to download the app in the first place. That would require everyone to have a smart phone with bluetooth turned on permanently, and to carry that phone with them at all times.
That is cloud cuckoo land!

 

[Jozhua]

OK, so you're both saying that we can't drive figures low enough for track and trace to manage. I can see that point of view and I may come round to it. And it means the consequences of the government's incompetence haven't yet finished, as if we don't get a vaccine there is a risk of having to go through second or third waves as the only way out.

I actually think we can keep cases low without a lockdown.

I think this virus' lack of rebound in places like Italy/Spain is down to controlling these "super spreading" events, where one person with a perticularly high viral load spreads it to many at once.

This can be achieved by limiting gatherings to say 20 or 30 people, keeping tables apart in bars/restaurants and not having groups of people crowded at the bar and encouraging people to leave gaps of a few days between interacting with different groups of people.

I think something like 100-130 cases in South Korea were tracked back to a nightclub, and I know there were a few "super spreading" events that happened in the UK too.

As for Aysmptomatic spread, working out how common this mode is for those new infections will be important to understanding how we can control the spread.

I think the important thing is to really grapple these super spreading events and trace contacts of those.

I don't believe that it would be impossible to implement a workable track/trace/isolate system, but not with this government and especially not with a central call centre approach. Empowering and funding local authorities to implement the system would be necessary, but whether or not it would be sufficient I am less sure about.

Yeah local authorities possibly, although you'd have to keep the system fairly similar and accessible in a standard way across the counties/nations, so people know how to use it.

Local authorities would also need to he willing to work cross-boundaries somewhat, considering that people will be travelling around, etc.

 

[Llanigraham]

Well one local Council has already set up their own system, and it seems to be working well from the lack of cases in that area:

Ceredigion County Council

Ceredigion County Council, mid Wales covers an area of 696 square miles and has a population of around 75,000.

www.ceredigion.gov.uk

Council develops contact-tracing method to keep track of coronavirus in Ceredigion
Ceredigion County Council has developed and is implementing a contact-tracing method for coronavirus in Ceredigion.
In summary, when information on positive results about coronavirus reaches us, a member of our Public Protection team makes contact over the phone with the person who has tested positively in order to gather thorough information that includes identifying 'close links' to which they may have transmitted the virus.
The information is collected and held securely on an online system which has been created specifically for the purpose of contact tracing. Contact is then made with close links to ensure that they are aware and are following tight guidelines for protecting themselves and their families and keeping them from spreading the virus further.
This approach to contact tracing has already been shared with Anglesey Council and is in the process of being rolled out across Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire Councils in partnership with Hywel Dda University Health Board.
Ceredigion has not developed an app for tracking people's movements because organisations such as the Kings and Imperial London Universities are already developing this software. Our intention will be to promote a movement tracking app when it has been approved by the Welsh Government.

07/05/2020

Also mentioned by various press outlets.

 

[northernchris]

Interesting you go straight for the authoritarian approach. I'd say a test-track-trace system would have much more engagement if people could trust it.

I agree there has to be trust in the system, but there's little point in having a live scheme designed to reduce the risk of spreading the virus (admittedly in its current form it's not likely to have much of an impact) if when you are contacted you can either provide false details or refuse to provide information. It just really frustrates me that people criticise the government and fail to see they also have a responsibility to work alongside the methods in place

You can't make it an offence if there is no legislation in place to force people to have the means to download the app in the first place. That would require everyone to have a smart phone with bluetooth turned on permanently, and to carry that phone with them at all times.
That is cloud cuckoo land!

I wasn't commenting on the app so not sure what your comment relates to

 

[6Gman]

I don't believe that it would be impossible to implement a workable track/trace/isolate system, but not with this government and especially not with a central call centre approach. Empowering and funding local authorities to implement the system would be necessary, but whether or not it would be sufficient I am less sure about.

Interestingly, (relatively) tiny Ceredigion set up a local track and trace system at a very early stage and has one of the lowest infection and mortality rates around.

 

[Tetchytyke]

I agree there has to be trust in the system, but there's little point in having a live scheme designed to reduce the risk of spreading the virus (admittedly in its current form it's not likely to have much of an impact) if when you are contacted you can either provide false details or refuse to provide information.

Trust is everything. And, rightly or wrongly, people don't seem to trust the UK government. It's hardly a surprise, really, when you see untrustworthy mediocrity like Dido Harding and Rupert Soames running the scheme. But one thing that definitely won't encourage engagement is going all authoritarian.

Other than jokes about saying you've seen Dominic Cummings, I don't really see people intending to provide false information. Serco haven't been able to contact 25% of people who have tested positive, but I suspect that's more to do with Serco's staggering incompetence rather than a disinclination to engage.

As an aside, I see Serco have already had one data breach from their track and trace system (thankfully staff details, not patients) but they've only been going a few weeks!

Serco shares email addresses of hundreds of contact tracers in ‘privacy breach’

The contractor is helping the government run its Covid-19 track-and-trace scheme

www.independent.co.uk

 

[PHILIPE]

Trust is everything. And, rightly or wrongly, people don't seem to trust the UK government. It's hardly a surprise, really, when you see untrustworthy mediocrity like Dido Harding and Rupert Soames running the scheme. But one thing that definitely won't encourage engagement is going all authoritarian.

Friends of the Government all the time. Dido Harding a peer married to a Tory MP. When she was CEO of TalkTalk they had a severe cyber attack but when interviewed she didn't know how many accounts had been affected or whether their data was encrypted or not although give her credit, she did admit that she should have known. Throw SERCO into the mix with a record of foul-ups but party donors.

 

[MikeWM]

I don’t see how it can work for a disease that is apparently asymptomatic in so many people (and that we’re repeatedly told can be spread by the asymptomatic, though I’m less convinced of that than many people seem to be).

 

[Yew]

This might be a discussion from another thread, but I think it's useful to differentiate between asymptomatic (someone who will have no symptoms) and presymptomatic (someone who does not yet have symptoms). As there seems to bea difference when it comes to transmission

 

[edwin_m]

When someone flags themselves up to the system as having symptoms then their contacts are advised to self-isolate whether they have symptoms or not. Assuming a reasonable level of compliance that will take a proportion of infectious people out of general circulation , so reduce the general risk and the reproduction rate of the infection. Until/unless there is a vaccine all we can hope for is a cocktail of measures which between them keep infection under control, and this is just one of those measures.

 

[CaptainHaddock]

I don’t see how it can work for a disease that is apparently asymptomatic in so many people (and that we’re repeatedly told can be spread by the asymptomatic, though I’m less convinced of that than many people seem to be).

I agree. It's bizarre how COVID-19 seems to be the one virus on the planet which you can apparently spread without having any symptoms.

It wouldn't happen with any other illness, would it? Suppose you went to your doctor and said you thought you had cancer or heart disease and when he asked you your symptoms you replaced "none at all". You'd be kicked out for wasting his time!

 

[Bletchleyite]

I agree. It's bizarre how COVID-19 seems to be the one virus on the planet which you can apparently spread without having any symptoms.

It definitely isn't. Chickenpox, for example, primarily spreads before the spots appear.

Symptoms do aid diseases in spreading, though, if you're sneezing or coughing you fire virus particles far further than in normal breathing.

 

[Freightmaster]

I agree. It's bizarre how COVID-19 seems to be the one virus on the planet which you can apparently spread without having any symptoms.

...which is what makes it so much more dangerous (irrespective of the R number) than SARS/MERS/Ebola/Swine Flu, etc
and why the whole world has gone into lockdown panic mode...



MARK

 

[Tetchytyke]

I agree. It's bizarre how COVID-19 seems to be the one virus on the planet which you can apparently spread without having any symptoms

Loads of viruses spread without symptoms. HPV is a great example, and plenty of others can transmit before symptoms display (e.g. chickenpox, herpes- both cold sores and genital herpes).

A virus exists to replicate, and there are many viruses which have adapted/evolved to delay symptoms as a way of replicating faster.

 

[Bikeman78]

I don’t see how it can work for a disease that is apparently asymptomatic in so many people (and that we’re repeatedly told can be spread by the asymptomatic, though I’m less convinced of that than many people seem to be).

Indeed. If I sit in a train near someone with a cough, it has never crossed my mind that I might have caught the cough without actually coughing! To my mind, if my immune system fights off a disease then I haven't had it.

 

[jumble]

How effective tracing will be is unknown
However Most impressed with testing
One of my lads lost his sense of taste
Went on line 09.30 yesterday, Booked test for 10.30 at local civic centre car park, test took around 15 minutes
Results ( Negative thank goodness) texted 20.00 so the whole process took less than 12 hours which shows someone has got their act together

 

[adc82140]

How effective tracing will be is unknown
However Most impressed with testing
One of my lads lost his sense of taste
Went on line 09.30 yesterday, Booked test for 10.30 at local civic centre car park, test took around 15 minutes
Results ( Negative thank goodness) texted 20.00 so the whole process took less than 12 hours which shows someone has got their act together

This needs to be the rule, not the exception.