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Comment by edmcnulty101 | Hacker News Reader

Google had a creepy Covid functionality that automatically downloaded without my consent to my phone.

Big tech is just chomping at the bit for the government to give them the go ahead to track everyone and enforce a 'papers please' society.

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I'm on a Pixel and Google Fi, no such thing happened to me. Are there other entities that might have hand their hand in this? (State, Telco, phone manufacturer)

Maybe they are referring to the “COVID-19 Exposure Notifications” setting.

Im using a Pixel too, and you can see the toggle if you go to Settings, then select Google.

Mine is toggled off, and I don’t really know he details of how it works, but it seems like you need to download some official COVID reporting app to enable it.

You probably have it, but it's just a feature. In this case, it's a default-off feature that allows contact tracing in a particular region if you actively choose to enable that.

Google ships features to my phone with every major update. This is just one more--completely opt-in--feature.

It was simply a feature that downloaded. It did nothing if you didn't turn it on.

> It did nothing if you didn't turn it on.

How do you know though? Google is constantly tracking your every move by default without you turning anything on.

So even if this feature had an on/off it was more by the grace of Google than by any strongly enforced anti-tracking feature.

> Google is constantly tracking your every move by default without you turning anything on.

They are. And you decided to take issue with a default-off feature instead. Of all the tracking features your phone has, this one seems like the least creepy. It's not like they're "asking consent" for every other feature they ship.

Totally disagree.

This is a feature that, with govt cooperation , could have led to criminal punishment.

There were already government punishments for COVID in place just not coordinated with big tech.

On the other hand, we could have a zero Covid planet. A place without pandemics. Bill Gates is the hero we need.

Zero Covid was and always will be a scam.

There was probably a window in time when cases were less than a few thousand or so when such a thing could have been possible. That's the real game in fighting emerging diseases. Early detection, identification of reservoirs and rapid vaccine development and aggressive isolation and ring vaccination if possible.

But I agree, it's absolutely laughable to think enforced social distancing could ever control a fully airborne disease, already so widespread, and with an R_0 over 4, especially now with the current rate of emergence of immunity escaping variants. Check out BA.4 and BA.5 in south africa right now, both of which seem to elude immunity from BA.1 just 6 months after Omicron's emergence.

Sure, it would have originally been rational to try to contain it until widespread vaccination could happen. That was no longer an option as soon as:

(a) Trump decided that his followers should treat it by injecting bleach, fish tank cleaner, and horse dewormer (b) the WHO and the CDC decided it wasn't an airborne disease because apparently they were still relying on research from 1949 C.E. (c) the CDC decided not to tell Americans that masks were effective (because they didn't want panic buying) (d) Biden's COVID czar decided to ostrich the whole thing

Now we're just fucked; everyone will get it, the question is how many times and how bad the next variants. And whether we'll ever develop effective treatment for long covid.

The cat was long already out of the bag at all of those points.

There's a small chance it could have been contained in late 2019 when Wuhan doctors were raising the alarm, but they were silenced and punished by Chinese government officials

> (a) Trump decided that his followers should treat it by injecting bleach

Never happened.

Boy. I sure hope Biden Admin’s misinformation dept gets out there and puts this one to bed.

>we could have a zero Covid planet

No we couldn't have. It's never been done in history and is probably impossible to do.

OP was being sarcastic.

Will you read his new book?[0]

If anyone were in a position to know whether it’s possible, and how to do it, he’d be on the list.

I think, regardless of his history regarding open source, water under the bridge long ago, he is worth taking seriously if we want to be prepared for the next one, which may come soon.

[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/704751/how-to-preve...

There are animal hosts, we can't get rid of it.

Of course we can, the question is, at what cost?

That seems to be theoretical. Are there any examples of eradicating a zoonotic disease that caused a pandemic (without it going away naturally)?

The first SARS didn't hit pandemic volume, but the outbreak is considered eradicated.

It's got a more favorable symptom profile - unlike SARS-CoV-2, infectious people pretty much always have a detectable fever.

That's the thing though. Things like SARS and MERS still exist in the animal reservoirs and could come back at any time. It never hit pandemic or even endemic levels. It's easy to eradicate something in a small geographic area with a small group if people. And you're right, the severity made it much harder for infections to be missed (I think it was less contagious too).

I was just saying that now something has hit pandemic level, it's unlikely we can make it go away. If we're lucky it will end up like the Spanish flu - people build immunity to the current strain during a few years and it mutates to something less severe.

I'm not sure we can, even if we try. At least not for any practical cost. Canada has been trying to curtail, and ideally eradicate, rabies from the wild for the last ~50 years. Rabid animals are systematically culled. There's an oral animal vaccine. There's an ongoing vaccination program where they scatter the vaccine all over the place in edible treat format. The ongoing cost of these programs is considerable, running to hundreds of millions of dollars.

And yet rabies has not been eliminated from the wild. Not by a long shot. The cumulative effect of these programs over the decades is to mostly eradicate it from inhabited areas in foxes, raccoons and other species which are prone to human interaction. Actual eradication of rabies in the wild in North America, is essentially unattainable, even if we scaled current programs up massively. Too many skunks slip through the net. Unless we're going to simply sterilize the outdoors, I'm really not sure we could eradicate animal reservoirs for COVID-19.

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