This explains why ongoing case contact tracing is more important in COVID19 than influenza, but also has more opportunity to make a bigger difference in COVID19.
How can IT help with this?
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In terms of contact tracing this would be useful.
Not sure that level of surveillance is available here
Maybe we could have an app for use during the pandemic that recorders and shares your location and captures the data of who you have been close to. A bit big brother eske and may not be possible at such short notice. This would need to come from a credible source though and would require oversight to ensure just used for covid-19 contact tracing at scale.
@jon_herries what do you think? There are sdks out there for location in some of the social networking apps and I believe some of the dating apps like bumble, grinder could we utilise that functionality for this. I am certain many people could feel reassured having such a covid-19 potential exposure app and it could help curtail the spread. When the epidemic is over they remove the app.
Would need multilingual support as well.
You could totally do this if you asked for people’s phone’s Location History for the past 2 weeks.
(I can envisage that some would be reluctant to do this, of course, possibly for good reason)
Asking people where they have been is prone to forgetting and error and poor recollection of timings.
You Location History is pretty damn on the money.
If you had enough of this data, fast enough you could track hotspots of where the virus particles are likely to be, and send in cleanup teams. Correlate it to other people’s histories and find those people who have touched the same door handle and where they are now!
@nathanb you beat me to it 
It’s not a race, and the logical thing to do.
we just need to get someone to build this quick and have assurances over data Governance is this something we can star putting on github and send out the bat signal. I am sure there will be some skilled programmers working from home that could help with this.
- Record location and time
- Record details of others on the app nearby
- provide advice on how to self isolate
- alow user to record positive covid result(may need to be laboratory for validity)
- receive alerts if you have had potential contact with a user who has tested positive for covid-19
What else would it need from a MVP point of view
Hi all- we are putting in an HRC rapid application with Airmed to do exactly this. If anyone is interested I can send them the application. We are very happy to work outside the HRC process on this directly with clinical and govt. Partners.
Obviously this all needs privacy work but basically:
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using existing data from phone records to model movement, clusters of people, and links between clusters.
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developing an app to collect symptoms and location and push out location-based and personalised advice.
PM I’m very happy to share this ( it needs to go in to HRC today or tomorrow so it will be a draft). We are interested because we have good software, big data and graph/social network people and we are working with clinical teams.
Anybody else wanting to partner on this is very welcome - too late to get on the HRC grant but I suspect it will have to go more quickly anyway so the clinical/MoH route may be better
My details are dparry@aut.ac.nz
Best
Dave
Dave Parry
HOD CS @ AUT
Exec Director KEDRI
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Is technically doable and is on our list - privacy and the associated social license is our big concern. There are some salutary tales out of the Chch Earthquake where locations were too quickly and easily shared.
Jon
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@Dparry and @jon_herries
Look have we had any discussions with the office of the privacy commissioner yet. We need to get the privacy and social licence sorted and need this now.
Because for it to be effective we need to have the tool in and in use before community based transmission kicks off.
I am assuming as part of the on boarding people will be asked for their consent to share their information
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Bill Gates touched on how IT could help in a global pandemic in his 2015 TED talk.
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Thanks @jon_herries for your comment. And it’s great to see the MoH are taking contact tracing seriously from rnz this morning:
As for privacy and social license with regards to data use, my personal view is that if this is going to save lives, we owe it to NZers to use whatever data we can. This is not a normal situation, and the privacy and social licence come second to public health concerns here.
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While I agree that there high need to move rapidly on this. To ensure high adoption and acceptance the privacy concerns must be addressed.
Knowing the programmers I work with, if there was something non socially acceptable released with minimal buy in, it will be hacked or modded to be completely useless by the end its first day of use.
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Thanks @nathanb this looks interesting! @jon_herries @darren.douglass and @shayne.hunter are you looking at or aware of this already?
Ap for community driven contact tracing used in Singapore
Good luck getting their attention here; those guys are completely overwhelmed. And doing a great job with what they’ve got.
Can someone in @Temp or @information-technologists with some headspace take an urgent look at this app and tell us if it is any good?
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Hi guys - we are hard at work today and tomorrow. Sorry for being slow to respond, we are struggling to keep up and get in front of this.
We have an option in the contact tracing space we are chasing hard - we are trying to balance social license and data access. It is linked to the testing process. We have an update planned with the CIOs Tuesday pm - @damon talk to Mike about getting the invite.
Jon
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I have had a quick look. Looks a good system that would work well in places like Singapore that are quite crowded. Whether would work well in nz would need thinking about - perhaps.
I think worth looking at and or asking Singapore if it was helpful.
Barry
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I doubt anything like this would be helpful in NZ where the penetration of a single app across the country is likely to be low, the possession of smart phones that are always on and always sharing bluetooth data is likely to be low, and whilst this might be of limited value in large urban communities would be of no value in small rural communities. I would also be concerned that a tracker like this would give people a false sense of security and undermine the physical distancing message.
jo
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I think its important to distinguish between using mobile phone data to make better transmission models and support decision-making, and the singapore contact-tracing, individual interaction approach. There is potential overlap of course, but I really think
that we have a huge amount of information from mobile location data that we can use to better understand how people interact and support better-informed testing and containment strategies. Its not an either/or choice, we can pursue both - they are relatively
low cost- but there have been huge advances on understanding how we can model social interaction networks, link them into transmission models and simulate policy effects. The data is there with or without a new App.
Dave
Dave Parry
HOD CS @ AUT
Exec Director KEDRI
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So we just need to free the data and to get our data monkeys onto it.
Anyone able to advance that???
Hi , not sure if this is still an outstanding issue, however have you thought of utilising something like Qlik to create this? We have a data scientist in our team here at HealthShare - I could have a chat to him.
Just a thought.