Yes indeed and that matches well with my saying there needs to be a threshold of approx 70+%. Currently Singapore aim to have reached that target by their National Day on 9 August but the current rate puts them reaching that milestone only in mid November. They have announced that they will increase their vaccination rate and have brought the time between vaccines back to 4 weeks after it was raised to 8 weeks before in an attempt to reach the target sooner.

Thank you. I'll provide updates which will hopefully help others in the same situation!

No, I'm not, see the beginning of my first post on the topic:

If they're for hiding the numbers a la Turkmenistan, well, then I'm not in agreement with them (or with the horse-loving dictator of down there).

I've just been looking at what my app displays. It shows a check into a pub, on Sunday and, at that point as far as track and trace is concerned I didn't leave until 23:59. I can see a number of flaws here:

• Check in but no check out
• So, if someone enters the pub after I leave, and subsequently tests positive after I leave, I assume that puts me in isolation
• Likewise if I enter the venue some time after a COVID positive person leaves
• It doesn't take into account inside vs outside, so if I'm sat outside while a COVID positive person is inside, again I suspect the app will tell me to isolate once the COVID positive person enters their test results into the app?

c-w-s may come along and correct me but it is my understanding that the checking in etc is a much smaller part of the contract tracing app than the Bluetooth tracking aspect. With the Bluetooth tracking aspect, it works by sending little packets of data out, any phone using the contact tracing app does the same thing and also “listens” for these packets. The app is then able to determine the following:
- how far away you were from each person
- how long you were near to that person

Thus if somebody whom you are considered “close enough contact for long enough” is reported positive, only then are you likely to be pinged to self isolate.

This is something I’ve not really understood about the UK app. The German equivalent, Corona-Warn, checks you in for 2 hours by default. But it can be adjusted if you leave earlier or later.

I’m sure that I’ve had a prompt to say something like “are you still here?” - not sure if it goes off a lack of substantial change in GPS location for a prolonged period of time beyond the original check in (or conversely a substantial change in GPS location when you’re still checked in) but would be a sensible way of approaching the problem assuming the relevant iOS and Android frameworks permit it.

You are correct in your observations and I am not.

It is the utter obsession and fixation on the cases. It was deaths, it was people on ventilators, it was on NHS being overwhelmed, and because that has plummeted, the fixation is now on cases. But the death and hospitalisations and NHS being overwhelmed is just not happening on the scale that warrants a change of tack so the fixation has turned to cases. How is that helping? We are cracking on with vaccines, be nice if we had more Pfizer it seems (personally I would let them eat AZ if they want) the routine stuff now needs to open as much as possible so treatments and ops that have been delayed can resume, if anyone that is jabbed, or not jabbed, feels threatened, honestly stay indoors. A year or more of cancers, etc etc not being spotted/treated is significant.

The GAEN system upon which the NHS COVID-19 app is based is explicitly not allowed to collect location data. Any contract tracing app developed for public health purposes that intends to use the GAEN system will not be eligible to use the API and is thus rendered pretty useless if the intent is to utilise the system.

This is absolutely true and will no doubt be a sad legacy of the last 15+ months. However, those who are being treated in hospital for Covid are real cases, requiring treatment. The health system is under strain because of Covid, not because of a somehow mistaken perception that Covid is more serious than it actually is.

I get the point around the obsession with daily cases, but to my that’s more of a psychological issue, it drives anxiety in some people. Fortnightly data supplemented by localised information on hotspots is preferable (do remember some immunosuppressed individuals where vaccines aren’t effective have a right to know what risk they are running on an ongoing basis). But I’m afraid I don’t see any link to the fact that huge swathes of hospital capacity was necessarily consumed to treat Covid patients.

So this covishield business has caused a fair degree of alarm in our house, as my wife's first dose was from one of the Serum Institute batches. It's a beautiful catch-22 that we're in now. We have to spend 10 days in France before we're allowed to go to Germany, but we can't get into Germany, where the covishield vaccine is accepted, because we now can't get into France.

You identify most of the issues with the app - now we have such high numbers of fully vaccinated people, I'd argue it is becoming a very blunt tool that quite possibly isn't actually contributing much to keeping the numbers down, at least compared to regularly taking lateral flow tests.

Whilst understanding that the main detection method is Bluetooth matching, this is still hopelessly flawed.

A colleague at work received a notification to self-isolate recently, in spite of having not actually left his house for the entire day when he was supposedly at risk. In the end we worked out that the trigger had occurred because his next door neighbour had tested positive, reported it, and their bedrooms backed onto each other on a party wall. Their phones had almost certainly been left close to this wall on charge over a period of several hours, so as far as the Bluetooth tracking was concerned that was enough signal strength for sufficiently long to prompt an alert. That's clearly nonsense and a false positive match, but he chose to self-isolate anyway because at the time he didn't understand how the trace worked.

Now the app does tell you to turn tracing off if - amongst other things - there's a physical barrier between you, or if you're wearing a surgical mask, but in reality who actually thinks to do that when most of us are just trying to go about our business as normally as possible? It's really not practical to be switching the status of the app several times a day.

The app also always assumes worst case - that you've not been vaccinated at all, that you weren't wearing a mask, that you were in an enclosed space with no ventilation. For the vast majority of people and situations that simply doesn't apply anymore, yet the app hasn't changed to take account of the reduced risk.

Even if you use the tube in London, say on the Circle Line, you and everyone around you will mostly be wearing a mask (the odd refusenik aside), if you're on the platform there's normally air moving through the tunnels, and if inside the train the carriage is open plan and the doors open about every minute, thus allowing air to circulate.

Consequently, a lot of people I know have simply taken the action of turning off tracing and are only using the app to check in to venues. I can't say, given how many other options there now are to reasonably check if you're infected, that I particularly blame them.

If you get a notification through the app, given it's not legally binding (as opposed to being named and called by Track & Trace) my advice is to assess it and work out the risk yourself, and back it up with regular LFT tests. That strikes me as blending practicality with responsibility.

On the Bluetooth bit, I suspect it is based on distance rather than signal strength which is all over the place at these frequencies. The distance is calculated from the time a ping response takes. Having a wall between phones makes no difference until the level drops below the receiver threshold. Using radio waves to simulate spread of a virus is very approximate. Viruses don't pass through closed windows, but Bluetooth does. So yes you need to use a bit of common sense and decide if the notification is reasonable and act accordingly.

I say this with a straight face. I promise. But with the numbers of people isolating via app pings increasing, what was the outcome of the Michael Gove daily LFT trial? Will this be rolled out to everyone?

I was on the tube on Wednesday this week, for only the second time this year. On the London Bridge - Stratford stretch of the Jubilee line, in my carriage there were only about 50% of people wearing masks in a carriage with no available seats but plenty of standing room, a small number of them were wearing sunflower lanyards but the vast majority weren't. An older gentleman asked one group of four girls (probably early to mid 20s) if they could please wear masks and they just replied with words to the effect of "Why should I? The virus won't get me and if you are worried then don't take the tube".

Yes, I assumed that would prevent it. However, there's nothing stopping apps that use these APIs from asking users to check in manually, which applies to the UK NHS Corona and the German Corona-Warn app.

With the latter (having checked in today) it defaults to a 2 hour check-in and then pings you at the end of that period to ask if you need to extend/alter it which you can do as shown below. It does note that "The length of stay will not be adjusted automatically in your contact journal' though, so I'm not sure entirely what the point of this option is... but either way, a couple of hours makes more sense than midnight as a default option if you're checking in somewhere during the day!

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...9c99b5388a.jpg