[guest]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

FINALLY, this is how you do it (oooh, but it's through international coordination - gasp! - the horror!):

EU to link national COVID-19 tracing apps together

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Commission on Monday launched an EU-wide system devised to link national COVID-19 tracing apps together in its latest effort to slow down the coronavirus pandemic. Following testing in different EU countries earlier this autumn, the bloc's executive arm said the system got underway with three national apps — Germany’s Corona-Warn-App, Ireland’s COVID tracker, and Italy’s immuni — now linked through the so-called interoperability gateway.

Sure, a number of technical things can go not exactly as planned. But this is part of how New Zealand fought and is fighting the virus in an exemplary way, SO WHY THE FUCK NOT TRY IT instead of just "recommending" to wear masks...

the utility of these is encumbered by what response exists on the operating end...like in europe or the states or wherever surges are occurring (love to all of you going through this it seems like a truly terrifying prospect), granted I'm not an epidemiologist hahaaaa but you need widespread and aggressive tracing to be able to actually capitalise on the affordances of an app like this. taking the example of aus, who outside of victoria (my beloved home) have otherwise quashed the disease, our nationwide tracing app has amounted to little more than an egregious waste of public coin in spite of massive uptake because it simply wasn't invasive enough. not entirely sure it's been used to identify an unknown case at any point through the whole pandemic, and its futility is compounded by the fact that state govts here are pursuing their own individual apps to supplant it.

also arguably was one of the things that contributes to complacency, taking the aus example: we were lulled into a sense of security with the fed govt proclaiming that a safe opening would be facilitated by the app and its broad uptake was the key means of restarting the economy which turned out to be a total fallacy; state govts used it as a security blanket/failsafe which spectacularly backfired when it came to the broader public's realisation that it was totally redundant.

tl;dr these apps are only useful if used in settings with small numbers and with very aggressive contact tracing to bolster them, and even in the 'covid paradise' of australia they've been utterly piss poor