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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

It's not a conversation about COVID. It's one about contact tracing. And yes I think that evidence should always be required when talking about potential tools for such mass surveillance. "It makes sense" isn't really proof for anything, as the last pandemic has proven times and times again. For example here in Quebec, contact tracing apps and tracking location of everyone with covid has had pretty much no measurable effect. Even fundamental questions like "what is a contact" are hard to answer, so actual studies might be helpful for this conversation.

And again, even tracing infectious contacts was much easier with mass tracking of every single citizens location, that still doesn't mean it is actually useful to stop a pandemic. It might be! Which is why I was asking for good evidence.

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Contact tracing (contact investigation, etc.) is a standard practice in public health. In tuberculosis control where I got my start, it's what we do for any active case of TB we identify - we find the people who may have been exposed and widen the circle as necessary. It's also critical for STDs.

The only difference with COVID was the scale, not the methodology. There is an argument that if the disease is everywhere, people can be infected anywhere, and you would need an accordingly exponential increase in monitoring scale to pull any kind of signal from the noise floor. But the principles work for any disease.

source: TB control physician for 17 years

I agree but do we use mass tracking for stuff like tuberculosis and STDs?

And agreed also that my point is probably more true for COVID than anything else. The scale of COVID is such that it automatically requires mass tracking to even consider contact tracing, but I guess my argument was that even then we should have evidence that such massive tracking improves contact tracing for very infectious viruses like COVID.

I'm genuinely asking, not in a "just asking questions" manner here. So thanks for replying! I didn't know contact tracing was useful for TB too.

I live in Québec. We never had mass tracking - this was FUD about the app, which did NOT share data... and that level of privacy protection is also why it was difficult to prove its positive impact.

What we did have was public health which sometimes managed to call people after a positive result - to warn their contacts, so they don't infect others in turn. This is absolutely standard for public health for many illnesses, and helps reduce contagion.

Neither of those is mass tracking. Public health doesn't report you if you went to see prostitutes or used illegal drugs; their job is to stop chains of transmission, and contact the people you were around. That's true for TB as mentioned, as well as smallpox, Ebola, etc

Anyways, since you're in Québec you might be interested in this figure, selecting the 0-49 demographic. Public health isn't telling us about this, or simple methods to reduce risk. Hell, HEPA filters are still near impossible to install in schools.

https://statistique.quebec.ca/fr/document/surmortalite-hebdo...

I purposefully mentioned the tracking separately from the app. I was implying that the app being used for massive tracking (just that it was another example of ineffective contact tracing), and if it came off that way I just wasn't clear about what I meant.

This is the story I was referring to: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canadians-trips-to-liquor-stor...

And I totally agree about your last point. I'll add a more controversial opinion that our Public health authorities have been completely politicised here. Legault does not want to talk about COVID anymore so we don't. And when it was scoring points politically, they blatantly played with facts and timelines to make political decisions sound "based on science". Very very disappointed about how our public institutions acted during the crisis. For example, that the crazy, criminal, stuff that happened in CHSLDs early on was completely swept under the rug with no government official suffering from any meaningful consequences was... Eye opening.

> but do we use mass tracking for stuff like tuberculosis and STDs?

My understanding (my mother is a doctor) is that we do try to do contact tracing for STDs, but this relies on patients' self-report of who they've been in contact with recently.

Hi; I built all of the contact tracing analytics for one of the Harvard hospitals during the pandemic. Also had a parent that was clin epi for 25 years.

The entire effort, using essentially every technology applied, was useless.

It was for many reasons, but primarily because the asymptomatic rate was very, very high, that there was no way to actually trace anything. Where or who you got Covid from was pure speculation for a majority of positive cases.

Scales and rates matter. With TB you have a very high fidelity, testable, slow spreading causal chain. Which is why TB tracing programs are effective, and good public health policy.

Our national Covid policies were ineffective, to say the least.

    > The only difference with
    > COVID was the scale, not
    > the methodology.

There was a lot of novel contact tracing methodology during COVID-19, e.g. contact tracing though Bluetooth "contacts": https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing

> that still doesn't mean it is actually useful to stop a pandemic

You're arguing against ghosts. That is not what I said, or even implied. I wrote:

> It is evident that having knowledge of individuals' travel destinations would undoubtedly assist in contact tracing efforts.

Tracking movement is obviously helpful for contact tracing, because you can track the proximity of individuals to each other and warn those who were near a confirmed case.

I wrote absolutely nothing on whether contact tracing is impactful, and I wrote nothing about whether you could accomplish the same result in a different way. The usefulness of contract tracing is not a conversation I wish to engage in.

Ok, how do you define a contact then? How can it be evident that tracking locations is obviously helpful for contact tracing without defining what it means to trace a contact? That's why evidence would be helpful here. How does knowing a location helps with determining a contact, especially for coarser tracking like know where someone is travelling.

You keep repeating that it is obvious and again, saying that something is just... obvious is not enough when discussing dangerous, almost "dual use" methods like contact tracing using mass tracking.

> Ok, how do you define a contact then?

You'll have to ask the Chinese CDC, I'm sure they have an answer for you much like our own CDCs do.

It's usually some combination of time and distance proximity to a confirmed COVID case.

I'll actually look into it, it sounds more interesting now that I started reading about it. Sorry if my comments sounded antagonistic, I was genuinely wondering. I'll dive into the rabbit hole now!

The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t give a shit whether it stops Covid or not. The technology isn’t exactly hard and they’re not doing it with US tech companies

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