[FRIAM] COVID tracking

[David Eric Smith]

Yes, seems to be a good app.

Georgia Tech has set up a group account that one can log into, and it is part of their campus surveillance system.

I do have to stop, and do something probably nobody on the list has any reason to care about, to give a shout-out to them.  The current GT monitoring system was designed, I think mostly if not entirely, by a young biophysics faculty (Josh Weitz) working with the department head (Greg Gibson).  Since early in the year, maybe April or May, they have had a streamlined testing pipeline, and their target (which I think they mostly approach) is to test the entire on-campus community weekly.  Their positivity return rate during the summer was around 0.3% for a couple of months; in the autumn it climbed back up through 0.7% and toward a percent, and the messages and exhortations started to come in fast and thick.  All that went together with refitting many buildings, including the old biology building where my office is, built in the middle Stone Age, with HEPA filters and UV irradiators in the HVAC ducts, occupancy protocols, and various else.  Certainly the effort involved was enormous work from a large number of people, and the two main guys were mainly designers and participants in the choreography.  But overall it has had the feeling of a pocket of sanity and good practice that would have been in place in any number of civilized countries in the Eastern hemisphere.  With the expected results of providing mostly excellent protection for a community of people.  And that, for a state school.

I do not know (have asked a CDC epidemiologist friend, who also doesn’t know) how much efficacy data has been compiled for NOVID-using communities: that is; what fraction of cases that would have escaped to potentially transmit, did they catch and get safely into a quarantine before anybody else was exposed?  Iceland did a great job of that with manual contact tracing back in the earliest days.  The real figure of merit for NOVID will be how much of that effect it can contribute through a decentralized computer app, which at least offers better scaling cost than manual contact tracing once the distribution is wide.  If somebody on the list finds good data on that, I would be interested to know.

Eric



> On Dec 15, 2020, at 1:12 PM, Tom Johnson <tom at jtjohnson.com> wrote:
> 
> NOVID is the first pre-exposure notification app to fight COVID-19. It’s free, anonymous, and shows you cases close in your network before you’re exposed. It only takes one minute to download. Please visit novid.org <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fnovid.org&c=E,1,VwlMJTw8gqSVqbo2jJiXmT5NM5NAq_5yttP-l2lMZNpp2VMc6PbSqDKtDArm04wXuOsKAwniiJ1YmGYvBupyCA7hDVU8uZl6NwnstOOkPcPVwTSWJKXWKZ6Q6A,,&typo=1> 
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