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Comment by akjetma | Hacker News Reader

Do location-based services work in the NYC subway? I suppose you could also infer locations and transfers based on train schedules and tower handoff times upon emerging from stations. I mean, if there is a 21-day gestation period between infection time and the ability to retransmit the disease, it seems like it would be worthwhile/possible to look into.

Apologies for the cliche 'use technology to solve all the problems' HN comment.

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It would be interesting to allow people in New York to compare their phone location data with his to determine the likelihood that they had contact with this person.

It should be standard practice to give someone returning from West Africa that had contact with ebola a GPS tracking device the records their exact location for 21 days following the last know exposure.

This notion that anyone exposed to ebola is basically responsible for keeping tabs on their own well being voluntarily leaves way too much room for human error.

Not the underground tunnels. Some of the stations have service, but not most.

But you should be able to infer location from the gaps. If someone was at station A, then disappears and 2 minutes later is recorded at station be, it should be possible to know they took the train between those two stations.

Yup. There's ample data from metrocards and security cameras to follow his route. The more difficult challenge would be finding everyone he had come in contact with on those trains since data granularity of which cars he took would likely be unspecific.

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