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A comment on Nearly 40% of Icelanders are using a Covid app, but it hasn’t helped much. Parent comment

Re:Nearly 40% of Icelanders are using a Covid app, but it ha... by this_user on Saturday May 16, 2020 @07:31PM (#23208085)
You also have to consider the failure rate of the app. I don't know about the Icelandic implementation, but most approaches seem to be based on Bluetooth. There are all kinds of reasons why one might miss a signal sent by device nearby, including interference on the 2.4 GHz band with things like Wifi.

Furthermore, the user has to actually report their infection, which probably not everyone is going to do.

If we multiply all of those terms, the end result will be much lower than 15% even in this scenario. The tracing apps seem more like wishful thinking than something that is going to provide sufficiently broad and reliable coverage to have anything more than a marginal impact.

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Re:Nearly 40% of Icelanders are using a Covid app, but it ha... by trfhuhg on Saturday May 16, 2020 @08:12PM (#23208284)
The entire premise of the app is that P[transmission] = F(distance, duration). I think this is a naive assumption and just the two input parameters have nearly zero predictive power, i.e. the variance of the estimated probability would make any further analysis useless. I'd also argue that the only case where it would be useful is tracing a zombie-level virus when there's willingness to lock down with military a 5 sigma radius around the probable infection. Otherwise it's just a tool for marketing and spying.
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