Fear and Loathing, a Rat Flu Odyssey

[Skidog]

yeah, we slowly keep losing privacy over time. but explicitly giving this information to the government under a false pretense (that it can help with contact tracing) and with the explicit goal of using this information to limit our abilities to be in public is a rather drastic step up eh? in the case of the UT app at least a system with no auditability, not vetted by security experts, no public visibility into how decisions get made, just a black box out of which the police can say "you have to stay home" seems like a big change to me anyway



yes and the entire point is: GPS is not suitably accurate on its own or in conjunction with other technologies to determine, indoors, whether 2 individuals are within covid-spreading distance. so why is it there at all? you can determine the whole thing via bluetooth only and spare us 1) the gross privacy invasion and 2) the giant infosec bullseye on your new datastore. even if you trust the intentions of every party involved, do you trust the security practices of the random developer who builds this app? in the UT case it's nobody especially reputable.

you hit the biggest nail on the head in this post. Once hackers know the data exists and people may pay for it, its nearly as good as stolen. There is nothing really unbreakable/unhackable.

[mall walker]

There is nothing really unbreakable/unhackable.

I know what you're getting at, but I'd say there actually are plenty of things that cannot be broken, for example one-way cryptographic hashing using certain (open source) algorithms. It is possible to design systems that are safe in this sense; storing a bunch of GPS data in S3 is not that type of thing though, which I think you're getting at, and on which we are entirely agreed.

eta: and whatever the folks rushing to market to sell this "contact tracing" thing to the stupidest state that would listen (Utah) did, it's almost certainly "store a bunch of GPS data in S3" or some analogous thing

[rod9301]

500 Million sounds high. 1% die of COVID. How many more die of heat attacks, strokes, cancer, etc that goes untreated as the world soon out of control with first hospitals crashing, then economies and finally governments? How many die forms eh violence that ensues? Have you not watched the Walking Dead?

Where do you guys get the 1% death rate, from what propaganda?
As of today 238,000 dead out of 3,366,000 infected. 7.1%.

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[mall walker]

to make an extremely non-technical analogy on a technical subject, the Utah contact tracing app is the "inject yourself with lysol" of contact tracing. it won't work and it has lots of downsides.

[Whiteroom_Guardian]

Is everyone still holding to the "no way it was in the US in early January" belief?

Whatever fucked me up for 3 weeks in Jan has caused lung pain and dry cough ever SINCE. It's May. WTF? I am seeing slow slow improvement with bike riding, etc. Just crazy. Nothing in my life ever caused this kind of prolonged lung issues. I doubt my "really bad cold" from over the winter caused this. Call me crazy I guess.

[BlatantAlias]

I admit I'm not at all familiar with the UT app so let me ask - is the intent to locate within 6 feet specifically, which I agree isn't going to happen, or is it to notify that someone had tested positive in a general location? The latter would see to just feed on people's fear without providing any meaningful data, no?

[KQ]

We can start by not willingly handing over our lives' minute by minute details via contact tracing apps. Simple enough, right?

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aren't you already doing that with your "Pixel 3 using [URL=http://r.tapatalk.com/byo?rid=84222]TGR Forums mobile app"

[mall walker]

I admit I'm not at all familiar with the UT app so let me ask - is the intent to locate within 6 feet specifically, which I agree isn't going to happen, or is it to notify that someone had tested positive in a general location? The latter would see to just feed on people's fear without providing any meaningful data, no?

They're definitely claiming that, if you find out you're infected, contact tracers can go and notify everyone who was "exposed" to you that they were exposed. The CDC et all are saying that's being within 6' for some time period iirc. They also claim the app will identify "hot spots" and it has some other features. I don't think the UT govt's intention was nefarious*, I think they're just not very sharp technologically, but it's still going to both not work and be a big privacy risk, imo.

* I certainly do think that if legalized mass GPS collection of individually identifiable citizens by the government becomes routine in the US it will be used nefariously

[BlatantAlias]

Whatever fucked me up for 3 weeks in Jan has caused lung pain and dry cough ever SINCE. It's May. WTF? I am seeing slow slow improvement with bike riding, etc. Just crazy. Nothing in my life ever caused this kind of prolonged lung issues. I doubt my "really bad cold" from over the winter caused this. Call me crazy I guess.

You know, I'm usually fairly healthy and don't get sick much at all, but since this past fall I had both friggin strains of the flu (I travel a lot for work), and then got a 3rd "upper respiratory thing" in January that tested negative for influenza, but it sucked so bad it made me wish I had the flu again. Luckily no lingering effects though.

[Adolf Allerbush]

yep.... someone like Cuomo could ride his current popularity wave maybe throw Whitmer on his ticket? Just spitballin here.

EDIT: Sorry...didnt want this poly, but im hoping for another choice to be honest.

Agreed.

[Whiteroom_Guardian]

You know, I'm usually fairly healthy and don't get sick much at all, but since this past fall I had both friggin strains of the flu (I travel a lot for work), and then got a 3rd "upper respiratory thing" in January that tested negative for influenza, but it sucked so bad it made me wish I had the flu again. Luckily no lingering effects though.

At the time I went into the Doctor (mild fever, bad very dry chest cough, NO sinus anything, very sore throat, terrible body aches). She gave me a strep test (negative) and didn't see any reason to do a flu test for some reason.

Whatever it was it sucked, but I worked through it and never took a sick day......it was hell. I would have taken a sick day or 10, but the only other employee at the company was so sick that he ended up in the hospital twice. Somebody had to work.

Who the fuck knows.

[ate'em]

If I knew Italian...

Then the grass might not seem so green over there.

Life gets grimy in the details. You just see it more when you understand the language/culture.

But, by all means, get yourself some rosetta stone and move along...

[Deebased]

Then the grass might not seem so green over there.

Life gets grimy in the details. You just see it more when you understand the language/culture.

But, by all means, get yourself some rosetta stone and move along...

He needs brain elasticity far more than he needs Rosetta Stone.

[The AD]

Where do you guys get the 1% death rate, from what propaganda?
As of today 238,000 dead out of 3,366,000 infected. 7.1%.

Already been covered. Most people who have been tested were tested due to showing symptoms, but the majority of those infected are asymptomatic. That means the actual number of infected is much higher than the number you quoted.

[splat]

And again the US shows the world why we're Number 1....fuuuuuuuuck.

[mall walker]

we are dumb and bad of course, but that is still a weird choice of countries for comparison. faeroe islands? estonia?

[The SnowShow]

Already been covered. Most people who have been tested were tested due to showing symptoms, but the majority of those infected are asymptomatic. That means the actual number of infected is much higher than the number you quoted.

Not only that but there are many many many people who had symptoms but couldn’t get tested because of lack of tests. Many positives are from people who had bad symptoms.

[The AD]

we are dumb and bad of course, but that is still a weird choice of countries for comparison. faeroe islands?

Which isn't even a country. It's a Danish territory.

[rod9301]

Already been covered. Most people who have been tested were tested due to showing symptoms, but the majority of those infected are asymptomatic. That means the actual number of infected is much higher than the number you quoted.

Agree, but this is the same with every other disease, like flu. People that have a mild case do not go to the doctor.
So we really don't know how many have the flu, we just know how many had bad enough symptoms to go to a doctor.

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[Adolf Allerbush]

Agree, but this is the same with every other disease, like flu. People that have a mild case do not go to the doctor.
So we really don't know how many have the flu, we just know how many had bad enough symptoms to go to a doctor.

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And like the flu the predicted percentage of people that get it that will die from it is adjusted for these types of factors.

[Deebased]

And like the flu the predicted percentage of people that get it that will die from it is adjusted for these types of factors.

Where did you get that idea from?

[The AD]

I'm pretty confident that the epidemiology of the flu has been studied extensively enough that they aren't simply considering those who went to the doctor when they calculate mortality rates.

[m2711c]

And again the US shows the world why we're Number 1....fuuuuuuuuck.

odd group to compare us to. how's russia doing?

[Mofro261]

Already been covered. Most people who have been tested were tested due to showing symptoms, but the majority of those infected are asymptomatic. That means the actual number of infected is much higher than the number you quoted.

This is false. Only a couple of limited studies, some with unreliable data, show more than 25-50% are coming up asymptomatic across multiple studies. Many of the asymptomatic studies thus far are not differentiating PRE-symptomatic from true asymptomatic, in the context of mild disease, and a known time to symptoms that ranges from 5-14+ days.

For instance: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-pers...ses-undetected

Now, on the surface, this headline would be 56% asymptomatic, 27 out of 48 positive with no overt symptoms. But then it states 24 of the 27 went on to develop symptoms with the next 4 days.

Fifty-seven (64%) of 89 residents in this second nursing home tested positive for COVID-19. Of the 76 residents who participated in the surveys, 48 (63%) tested positive. Twenty-seven (56%) of the 48 had no symptoms when tested, and 24 of them later had symptoms within a median of 4 days.

Here is a summary of various studies, most claiming less than 25%.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-...-asymptomatic/

What is widely held is that the confrimed rtPCR positives likely represent only 10% of the overall infections, and that 90% of true cases are not being documented. This is NOT to say those 90% of those infected are asymptomatic and don't have any clinical symptoms.

[The AD]

This is false. Only a couple of limited studies, some with unreliable data, show more than 25-50% are coming up asymptomatic across multiple studies. Many of the asymptomatic studies thus far are not differentiating PRE-symptomatic from true asymptomatic, in the context of mild disease, and a known time to symptoms that ranges from 5-14+ days.

Here is a suymmary of various studies, most claiming less than 25%.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-...-asymptomatic/

What is widely held is that the confrimed rtPCR positives likely represent only 10% of the overall infections, and that 90% of true cases are not being documented. This is NOT to say those 90% of those infected are asymptomatic and don't have any clinical symptoms.

Fair enough. I think the point still stands that, as of today, simply dividing number of deaths by number of confirmed cases isn't going to get you an accurate mortality rate for COVID-19.