I'd hate to wear a lanyard, but I've come round to the CovidCard

Friday, 28 August 2020

An academic involved in a trial in Nelson of the CovidCard has high hopes for its use as a tool in the battle against coronavirus in managed isolation facilities.

OPINION: Kiwis have developed a healthy scepticism for ‘brilliant ideas’ put forward by our country’s technology entrepreneurs.

The proposal that everyone should carry around a Bluetooth “CovidCard” that would create a record when people spent much time in close proximity, to help with Covid-19 contact tracing, might seem far-fetched.

When Trade Me founder Sam Morgan told me CovidCards would need to be worn as a lanyard around the neck to work best, my first reaction was “well, that’s that then”.

CovidCards would need to be near universal to be effective.

The suggestion from Innovator of Year Ian Taylor that we might call CovidCards “the Paddle” and all wear them with pride left me a bit unmoved, to be quite honest.

* Contact tracing: NZ 'missed opportunity' during 102 days without Covid

* Coronavirus: Hundreds of people in Rotorua will test 'CovidCard' bluetooth device**

A loose coalition of technologists believe they have run into a brick wall at the Ministry of Health for their plan to improve contact tracing.

I’d like to think I can be a team player.

But I prefer messing around in my single kayak to paddling a waka, and believe me when I say it’s not “a fashion thing” but the idea of wearing a lanyard semi-permanently gives me the shudders.

Trouble is though, the more I have looked into the snarly options involved in coping with the virus, the more I reckon there may simply be no other choice.

Other than accepting the virus will run riot and crossing fingers for a somewhat effective vaccine, that is.

Lockdowns have been an effective way to buy time and stave off the virus until we know more about the nuisance we are dealing with, but at some point we will need to take stock.

Globally, new diagnosed infections appear to have peaked for the time-being at a bit below 300,000 a day.

Deaths have recently stabilised at about 6000 a day, which points to the virus adding in the single-digit millions each year to the world’s total annual death toll of about 60 million people.

Sad to say, there is no easy global consensus to be reached on the sacrifices that might be justified to tackle that problem, which unfortunately means this is an illness that is going to stick around.

Even in New Zealand, public support for tough measures to eliminate Covid-19 has started to fracture at the edges.

We may soon need a solution – or at least hope there is a solution in the pipeline – that could allow the country to cope with future outbreaks in a way that doesn’t cost a couple of billion dollars every fortnight, if we are not to eventually throw up our hands in surrender.

The CovidCard is currently that best hope.

As of last week, at least, I think a few pennies had still to drop with ministers about how it could work.

CovidCards use Bluetooth radio signals to measure how close people come to one another and how long for.

If someone is diagnosed with Covid-19 their card can be handed over and the data on it accessed by contact tracers to identify their close contacts.

Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi has announced those already in the country with visitor visas due to expire before the end of October will have their visa automatically extended for five months.

As their developer Dean Armstrong explained, they are a tool for contact tracers – “a human in the loop” rather than an automated solution.

But they will only work if pretty much everyone has them, which means that to be of much use they would need to be compulsory to carry in public.

Contact tracing within families and non-public facing workplaces isn’t really the problem.

Government Digital Services Minister Kris Faafoi has suggested that an alternative to CovidCards might be to use the Bluetooth function already built into our smartphones to do the same job.

He has mentioned the potential of the NearForm app in Ireland.

One snag with that is that research suggests the strength of Bluetooth signals sent out by different smartphone models may vary far too much to be useful.

Armstrong also notes signal strength can change depending on whether phones have their wifi on or off.

The technical brains behind the CovidCard is Hamilton radio engineer Dean Armstrong.

Those problems are massively compounded by the fact that people carry smartphones in different ways – in front and back pockets, buried in handbags and backpacks and so on.

We would be better able to use smartphones as Bluetooth tracing devices if we wore them as lanyards or duct-taped them to our chest, but that’s not realistic.

The lack of data on the reliability of smartphone-based proximity aids appears telling.

But The Financial Times reported this month that 30 per cent of close contacts where people were 2 metres away from each other were missed by Bluetooth smartphone apps, while 40 per cent of contacts that were recorded as “close contacts” were not in fact close contacts.

Trials overseen by Otago University and the Defence Technology Agency have indicated that in contrast, CovidCards have a “false negative” rate of less than 10 per cent and a false positive rate of 20 per cent.

That is quite impressive.

For the same reason that the variability of signal strength in smartphones is a problem, mixing and matching CovidCards and Bluetooth smartphones would probably be the worst of both worlds.

The other “killer” with using the Bluetooth function on smartphones for registering close contacts is that no-one will know if other people are in fact doing that.

You couldn’t check that without – who? Police? – inspecting people’s phones to see if they had Bluetooth and the app working, and presumably dishing out big fines for non-compliance.

In contrast, CovidCards are designed to be seen and ensuring compliance through community peer pressure needn’t be scary.

It is a fair bet that lots of people would not use a Bluetooth app on their phone, given that no-one would be any the wiser if they didn’t bother.

Not everyone has a smartphone and phones can run out of battery much faster when Bluetooth is on.

Even if 70 per cent of people used a Bluetooth contact tracing app on their smartphone religiously, that would translate into just under half of contacts (49 per cent) being traceable.

And I fear we’d be kidding ourselves to think the compliance rate would get that high.

Using a ‘dumb’ non-internet-connected device issued by a government agency – which is what the CovidCard would be – makes the privacy challenges far easier to manage as well.

An illustration of what it could be like using CovidCards.

The biggest penny that I worry hasn’t yet dropped with everyone in Government, is that if we do go down the CovidCard route, time may really be of the essence.

Indeed, it may already be too late.

CovidCards are a tool to assist manual contact tracing, but that is only of use if the number of infections in a community is relatively limited.

Too many infections, and contact tracers will get swamped no matter what technology is used to support their work, and lockdowns and restrictions become the only options to rein back the disease.

Crucially, we don’t yet know whether the re-emergence of Covid-19 at a cold store in Auckland was just very bad luck, or the first of many frequent reinfections that we can expect to deal with – probably less well each time – every couple of months.

No-one knows where we may be in January, which Morgan believes is the earliest CovidCards could be deployed if the Government gave them the green light now.

This illustration depicts what it could be like for CovidCard users to be notified about having come into contact with someone with Covid-19.

Faafoi has suggested the Government could leave a decision on CovidCards until early next year while it did more trials and put them into the sort of wider policy framework that the public service loves.

But that would mean CovidCards couldn’t be deployed until May at the earliest, by which time the chances of them being useful might be much reduced.

It is totally understandable that ministers would want to do as many trials as possible before splashing out $100 million on a contact tracing solution that might, or might not, save the day.

But it’s not the right mindset in this case.

Having “experts” review technology projects to death before, or after, crossing the start line actually achieves very little.

What matters most is that the people building the solution know what they are doing in the first place.

Armstrong seems to fit that bill.

He has a doctorate in electrical engineering from Waikato University and has spent 20 years as a developer and adviser on wireless chip design and integration, including five years with Cambridge Silicon Radio in the UK, and counts chip giants Samsung and Qualcomm among his clients.

There are solutions to most of the common objections raised with regard to CovidCards.

People might not want to wear them on the rugby field or in the gym.

So chuck the lanyards into a cardboard box on the sidelines or hang them on a peg at the rec centre when you arrive, and they can do their “handshakes” there.

Worry there is too much danger of people contracting Covid in a church or nightclub even from people who might not get that close?

It’s a reasonable concern.

But it would be possible to build static CovidCard transceivers at the entrance to such venues so everyone tagged that when they walked in.

At its most basic that could be achieved by someone simply taping their CovidCard to the door, though there would be more elegant solutions.

CovidCards will have a QR code printed on them, which could allow them to be tagged by a reader for location-based tracing if that proved a necessary adjunct, or could be used in conjunction with the Covid Tracer app.

These things needn’t involve changing the way the card performed.

Not everything – surprisingly little in fact – needs to be fully worked out before we got underway.

I don’t know whether CovidCards would be either enough or necessary to make a difference to the transmission of the virus in the long run, and without the benefit of time travel I can’t see how anyone else would know that either.

So it’s always going to be a gamble, but it is, relatively speaking, a cheap one.

The best chance of that gamble paying off would be to place that bet right now.

In my view, the Government should commit to a full roll-out of CovidCards and get the work underway immediately to enable that.

It should continue with its planned trials, but only assuming that doesn’t hold up deployment, and be ready to terminate the investment if a better option – or an unavoidable obstacle – rears up.

In the meantime, it would be great if more people could use the Covid Tracer app we already have, as it is better than nothing.

If the Government doesn’t have the nerve for this approach, and/or if the elimination strategy fails, let’s also not think the lockdowns we have had have been pointless.

The health system has had more time to prepare for a wider outbreak and to learn how better to treat the disease, for example with non-invasive ventilation.

People who are more vulnerable have also had more time to learn and practice how to keep themselves safe.

We’ve come to recognise some benefits in masks, for one thing.

But I do feel CovidCards would give us chance of doing more than just “delaying the inevitable” and, yes, I’d wear the damned lanyard.