24-07-2020, 10:23 AM
51
Re: Coronavirus: Test and Trace App.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-53518999BBC News NI
Northern Ireland will be the first part of the UK to have a contact tracing app. The Republic of Ireland's app launched earlier in July. Both apps have been designed by the company Nearform.
Mr West, a chief digital information officer at the Department of Health, said the NI app would notify close contacts automatically. It would also identify people at risk of infection who would be impossible to trace through the traditional method.
The UK government is working on an app using the Google Apple toolkit
Mr West said the development and operation of the app in Northern Ireland "is orders of magnitude cheaper than the efforts in England to develop their app so far". He said it would cost less than £1m to build and operate.
The UK government is working on developing an app for use in the rest of the country. In England an NHS team spent four months and nearly £12m developing an app which was trialled on the Isle of Wight but did not work as planned. Health Secretary Matt Hancock then announced the new focus would be on a decentralised app using the Google Apple toolkit - but that was unlikely to be ready for months.
Meanwhile Dido "Incompetent" Harding has no idea when the multi-million pound English app will be ready, if ever .....
02-08-2020, 12:06 PM
52
Re: Coronavirus: Test and Trace App.
Coronavirus: Scotland developing its own contact-tracing apphttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53608111
31 July 2020
On Thursday, Northern Ireland became the first part of the UK to deploy a contact-tracing app.
Scotland is adapting the Republic of Ireland app, which uses the Apple-Google framework, it will also be compatible with the apps used Northern Ireland and Gibraltar.
Scotland's Health Secretary Jeane Freeman said existing manual contact tracing would continue to be used alongside the app.
That leaves England lagging behind the rest of the UK and Europe .....
10-08-2020, 06:22 PM
53
Re: Coronavirus: Test and Trace App.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53723398This follows demands for more data and information from local health chiefs.
The approach has already been used in coronavirus hotspots in Blackburn with Darwen, Luton and Leicester.
The national service will shrink from 18,000 contact tracers to 12,000 with the remaining non-NHS call handlers redeployed as part of dedicated local test and trace teams, the Department of Health says.
This relies on people with local knowledge collecting information by going door-to-door on foot.
Several councils, including Cumbria and Caldervale, have pre-empted the government's volte-face by setting up their own test and trace systems while the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has said "This NHS test-and-trace system currently is not good enough to go into a winter with no treatment or vaccine" and he repeated calls for government to listen more to regional authorities, urging ministers to give councils extra funds to do more contact tracing locally, including for "people who can knock on doors and do a better job than this national call centre system".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan...ester-53714874
10-08-2020, 07:24 PM
54
Re: Coronavirus: Test and Trace App.
I thought this contact tracer was a phone app, and therefore, once developed, available to millions. Of course most people don't like the idea of being traced so shrug it off.But I may be mistaken, it seems.
Analysing and dealing with the virus on a regional level, sounds an excellent idea.
Volte-face? We're on a learning curve.
10-08-2020, 07:36 PM
56
Re: Coronavirus: Test and Trace App.
My daughter discovered over the weekend that the mother of someone in her social/support bubble was hospitalised and tested positive for coronavirus (she has some kind of underlying condition which makes it difficult to breath at times anyway). My daughter, who had had contact with her friend recently, duly called her place of work (a food retail outlet) to explain that she was going to have to go for a test, which she did. She discovered this morning that she was tested positive, and so is in isolation, along with my wife and myself. No obvious symptoms from any of us yet, and hopefully this will continue to be the case.The relevance of all this for this thread is that my wife and I were sent text and email messages alerting us of the need to isolate, and to fill in a short questionnaire (DOB, ethnicity, postcode/house number, plus whether we had any symptoms). They had got our contact details from our daughter when she herself filled in some kind of questionnaire.
Is this what they mean by contact tracer? I though the idea was that an app could use GPS to alert people to possible other people who were virus positive.
I was told by a friend over the weekend that Ireland appear to have a successful app up and running, but that the UK government was refusing to buy it. I was also told that the system that the UK gov't was trying to implement uses Apple maps, which is incompatible with the software that is being developed since it is a closed system (whatever that means). Perhaps the more tech savvy on here can elucidate on this matter.
10-08-2020, 08:18 PM
57
Re: Coronavirus: Test and Trace App.
24-07-2020, 10:23 AM#1Coronavirus: Northern Ireland contact tracing app to launch next week:
https://www.over50sforum.com/showthread.php?t=69386
20-07-2020, 02:59 AM#1
Coronavirus: England's test and trace programme 'breaks GDPR data law'
https://www.over50sforum.com/showthread.php?t=69304
27-05-2020, 07:02 PM#1
Coronavirus: Test and trace system will start on Thursday
https://www.over50sforum.com/showthread.php?t=69304
08-05-2020, 01:50 AM#1
Coronavirus: NHS contact-tracing app - Dido Harding heads track and trace programme
https://www.over50sforum.com/showthr...highlight=dido
11-08-2020, 12:39 PM
58
Re: Coronavirus: Test and Trace App.
The view from the USA:England’s Flawed Virus Contact Tracing Will Be Revamped
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/w...-overhaul.html
Contact tracing has long been envisioned as the bridge between lockdown and a vaccine, allowing the government to identify clusters of infections and stop people from passing on the virus. Without an effective system, scientists warned recently, schools could not safely reopen in September, as planned.
Part of the problem, analysts said, was that Mr. Johnson had entrusted England’s system largely to Serco, an outsourcing giant that had recently been obliged to pay the government a hefty fine for fraud on a previous, unrelated contract. Other nations within the United Kingdom, including Wales and Scotland, which are in charge of their own contact tracing, appointed public health officials to run their programs.
Health workers employed by local authorities picked up the most complicated cases in settings like nursing homes, schools, homeless shelters and prisons. They traced more contacts than the privately employed workers, and reached a higher percentage of them: By late July, they had reached 148,000 of 151,000 contacts.
11-08-2020, 01:54 PM
59
Re: Coronavirus: Test and Trace App.
Good to hear that a third of the centralised contact tracers are being scrapped, they should get rid of all of them now and give the money to localised environmental health authorities so that they can train up more people before the winter.Centralised contact tracing was never going to work very well, this kind of thing needs local knowledge. I will give an example,local people including community police know which areas and housing estates frequent certain pubs and clubs etcetera and can share that knowledge with EHA local health departments .
11-08-2020, 02:54 PM
60
Re: Coronavirus: Test and Trace App.
Originally Posted by Meg
->
Good to hear that a third of the centralised contact tracers are being scrapped, they should get rid of all of them now and give the money to localised environmental health authorities so that they can train up more people before the winter.Centralised contact tracing was never going to work very well, this kind of thing needs local knowledge. I will give an example,local people including community police know which areas and housing estates frequent certain pubs and clubs etcetera and can share that knowledge with EHA local health departments .
Apparently they were sat around doing nothing and watching Netflix.
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