General > General Technical Chat
Bluetooth Low Energy is unsuitable for COVID-19 contact tracing, say inventors
Marco:
--- Quote from: cdev on May 14, 2020, 03:09:12 am ---Security theater that is totally inaccurate is worse than nothing.
--- End quote ---
That depends, there is a good chance that the security theatre is just saving face. I personally believe a lot of Europe is at the tail end of the pandemic ... regardless of lockdown. If security theatre lets governments end the lockdown without admitting they screwed up implementing it, well it's better than staying pot committed to lockdowns.
A bit of experimentation with the tech to see what works can still be useful for when we encounter a properly dangerous pandemic too.
I'm not sure even a bag attenuates ultrasound beyond what signal processing can rescue from noise in reasonable time.
cdev:
We are dealing with viruses the wrong way for the 21st century.
Somebody brought up a concept yesterday, "Original Antigenic Sin"
Read up on the importance of making sure the first vaccine for a disease family that somebody gets is the right one.
The stakes are very high because a wrong vaccine will make people much more vulnerable to a serious disease later Some vaccines convey broad immunity, some convey narrow immunity that prevents immunity to other strains of a pathogen.
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"We live in a sea of viruses, some of which are human pathogens. These pathogenic viruses exhibit numerous differ-
ences: DNA or RNA genomes, enveloped or naked virions, nuclear or cytoplasmic replication, diverse disease symptoms, etc.
Most antiviral drugs target specific viral proteins. Consequently, they often work for only one virus, and their efficacy can be
compromised by the rapid evolution of resistant variants. There is a need for the identification of host proteins with broad-
spectrum antiviral functions, which provide effective targets for therapeutic treatments that limit the evolution of viral resis-
tance. Here, we report that sirtuins present such an opportunity for the development of broad-spectrum antiviral treatments,
since our findings highlight these enzymes as ancient defense factors that protect against a variety of viral pathogens."
(Source: Koyuncu E, Budayeva HG, Miteva YV, Ricci DP, Silhavy TJ, Shenk T, Cristea IM. 2014. Sirtuins are evolutionarily conserved viral restriction factors. https://mbio.asm.org/content/mbio/5/6/e02249-14.full.pdf )
julianhigginson:
I think that going on and on about the RSSI strength detection thing and thinking it has to be perfect or it's useless is missing the point.
The contact tracing app is not meant to be 100% perfect.
if it can work even a bit, it can speed up transmission tracing.
which will catch some transmissions before the transmitted to person gets sick enough to be tested and get diagnosed (by which time they have passed it on themselves). so will bring down the reproduction number.
we see in the studies on clusters so far that exposure risk relates to the amount of viruses being expelled form the source vs time near the source. You can do worse in a room far away from someone who is just breathing if you are there for hours, than if you are right next to someone who is singing or shouting or exercising for a few minutes.
having the app log some kind of proxy for distance *and* time spent nearby would be useful, I suspect. Even if not perfectly accurate. seems that it only logs contact that has lasted around 15 minutes? seems a shame it can't measure times with a bit more accuracy. or at least multiples of 15 minutes.
nali:
This is a pretty interesting blog post on the UK app:
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/security-behind-nhs-contact-tracing-app
David Hess:
--- Quote from: nali on May 14, 2020, 12:44:30 pm ---This is a pretty interesting blog post on the UK app:
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/security-behind-nhs-contact-tracing-app
--- End quote ---
The direct or of the National Cyber Security Centre (Ian Levy) is explaining how they are going to protect your privacy and security using a closed source application? That is a laugh.
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