How would Google reliably know which people had it, so it could warn people they'd been near?

(Disclosure: I work for Google)

They don't go outside anymore and search for "when do I have to go to the hospital if i have coronavirus". Or you can just report it.

(Disclaimer: I work on an app that tries to do that. Ideally privacy preserving. And we implemented it using Google Nearby API to detect whether people are close. But that sends all messages over Google servers and that would be a deal breaker for us, but the tech itself would be really cool to have. Let me know if you can help.)

Also Related Work:

Singapore doing this: https://www.tracetogether.gov.sg/

This as hardware: https://estimote.com/wearable/

That has way too many false positives to be worth notifying potential contacts over.

You could have something where people who have it can say "I have it, please let others I was near know" but unless we get testing up dramatically that won't work either.

Exactly, these are the things to get right. Hard problems but for sure not impossible.

Also, the alternative of total lock down is hard to beat when it comes to false positives. ;)

A lot of people don't go outside anymore and search for symptoms. Even people who don't normally worry are going to search since it's allergy season, and some symptoms overlap.

(Disclaimer: I work on an app that tries to do that. Ideally privacy preserving. And we implemented it using Google Nearby API to detect whether people are close. But that sends all messages over Google servers and that would be a deal breaker for us, but the tech itself would be really cool to have. Let me know if you can help.)

You can just edit your first post. It's inside the two hour window. All these addendums-as-posts clutter things up.

good call

How would you verify that people who search for these things actually have the virus? They could be doing preemptive research.

And how would you find a list of such questions without just broadly matching on terms like "coronavirus"? The task seems very complex to me.

You're right. Both availability of testing and how much the lock down is relaxed increase the need of this drastically. But those are both things that are likely to increase during the course of the year.

1. Doesn’t work when there’s a general lockdown

2. People could just be searching out of curiosity and heightened awareness

3. Can’t self-report if you can’t get tested

That would still be a legal minefield, and rightfully so.