Unfortunately the building block of test and trace which is the test itself is about as accurate as sticking your finger in the air. Test and trace is a fools errand and can never work in a western democracy where everything is by consent. The UK system is actually the best in Europe which is saying something! Far better to follow Mike Yeadon’s view and remove community testing altogether and direct it to healthcare settings. I thought this a while ago and good to see someone far cleverer than me has actually said it.
Trust in politicians has never been great in recent times and that situation is exacerbated by the woeful gotcha MSM we have to put up with nowadays. Rebuilding any trust in politicians will be a hard slog after this so called pandemic. There is good evidence that we have been serially lied to and taken for fools by the govt, the opposition, and even worse the scientists. Even worse they have use psychological messaging techniques to influence behaviours.
> Unfortunately the building block of test and trace which is the test itself is about as accurate as sticking your finger in the air.
Evidence? David Spiegelhalter in the Indy: “The ONS survey [from June] did 112,000 tests and only got 50 positive tests out of it,” he said, noting that even if all of these were false positives, the rate would be under 0.05 per cent.”
The false positive rate of the UK test has yet to be made public but is to be believed to be around 0.8% At that level when (if) 500k tests per day are reached the false positives will be 4000 per day. This isn’t peanuts. It also means if the positive test count falls under 4000 per day then the test has the potential to be 100% false positives. The possibility of the testing through the summer being significantly false positive due to the low prevalence is real. The Daxx test has a FPR of 1.8%. The issue around residual inactive virus and low presence at a level below a transmittable level remains. There are also issues around the process. Last week saw a lab supervisor resign because the testing process he was supervising was concerning not least because of the skill level of the operators which has deteriorated since the universities went back and the summer staff were no longer available. There is a risk of contamination in the process. Mike Yeadon believes the FPR when everything is considered in the round could now be as high as 3% My concern remains that of misdiagnosis and mistreatment due to false positive test results and the other issues.
I would also add that at the beginning of September the govt changed the testing protocol to include the retesting of weak positives. Not in the media and no confirmation I can find that it actually happened.
Helen Wood
3 years ago
I think disclosing ID to police from the track and trace results is a serious breach of trust .Presumably we will be coerced into having the NHS Covid App becos restuarants will start to refuse entry without it. The NHS states on the App- it may disclose your details to local authorities(presumably to enforce self isolation.) The behaviour of the police in fining students £10000 for breaching regs and partying is a signal of the disproportionate authoritaranism now being wielded towards the public. ..who are frightened of not just Covid butnow of deliberate Govt.misinformation. They are stressed and deprived of family and social support and till now have largely behaved responsibly. We need to recognise and resist this normalisation of a bio state which intervenes in every aspect of ones life-and appears to want to be criminalising the public with the help of technological surveillance. I will provide as few details of myself or others health status or mobility as possible but I will make moral decisions regardless of the states interference.
> The NHS states on the App- it may disclose your details to local authorities(presumably to enforce self isolation.)
No, they say:
The app cannot:
use your GPS location or track where you have been be used to check or monitor if you’re self-isolating be used by law enforcement to identify or track you see personal information on your phone, such as your messages, address book or your phone contacts
Simon Holder
3 years ago
Hmmm… I have been put off Test and Trace for exactly the reasons the author notes in her first paragraph and while I think the government has performed poorly in this area, one has to say that they have been blindsided by the fact they’re fighting a pandemic which no-one (still?) knows much about and also are quite rightly looking at some bigger pictures regarding Brexit and a potential global slump, as well as lunatic SAGE advisers who are so far down their self-righteous restrictions routes they do not dare to retract or revise their postulations. I think the best Test and Trace is the one where the Nightingale hospitals are used solely for Covid patients, so allowing normal hospitals to function for all the other myriad afflictions our human race is susceptible to. Then protect the elderly and symptom-full people, so allowing everyone else to get on with their lives as espoused in the Great Barrington Declaration. Then whether the Test & Trace app works or not, is adhered to, heeded or used would become irrelevant.
Alan Thorpe
3 years ago
We are sold this app on the basis that no personal data is collected. It has a phone number and not even a full post code if you decide not to put it in. But of course, we get a call if identified and then all the personal data is collected. It is completely pointless unless there is regular testing because people can be infectious and not know if. When tested and found positive they might not be infectious because the test is so unreliable. It is mass intrusion in our lives by the state.
penangtom
3 years ago
Digital technology has been quietly gaining importance in healthcare for years.
Until lockdown I could book a doctor’s or nurse’s appointment using an app. That is no longer available – presumably due to COVID. Not all uses of digital technology have advanced recently.
M J Kelly M D
3 years ago
Contact Tracing for Covid19 IS A JOKE!. Ms. Harkness is yet another scientifically-challenged journalist who still believes that Covid testing is turning up “CASES.” It is not. The RT-PCR should be immediately banned given the False Positivity of up to 94%. WOULD YOU QUARANTINE YOURSELF IF YOU WERE COMPLETELY ASYMPTOMATIC AND HAD A POSITIVE COVID19 SWAB?
> The RT-PCR should be immediately banned given the False Positivity of up to 94%.
What is your evidence for this? The FP rate is nowhere near that high. Are you referring to Dominic Raab’s flub about border testing? Turns out he was actually talking about the false negative rate, see Fullfact’s “Dominic Raab did not say Covid-19 tests have a 93% false positive rate” article.
Lindsay Gatward
3 years ago
Having had the virus or at least retrospectively all the symptoms in February before it became a legal matter these dilemmas should not arise – The lawyers advice is don’t talk to the authorities unless you have to and of course never admit guilt as most convictions depend on confession – It is satisfying to tell any authority asking that the only person who has been close enough to you to need to self isolate is them – A few months ago it was apparent that the danger of this virus was similar to flu and now the comparison particularly that the average death is 82 is now more similar to the common cold which is also a Covid and also commonly kills at about that age and similarly always with co morbidities – So best to do what you would do if you had a cold – Our newly authoritarian government is overreacting because this is a very weak epidemic shown by most needing to be tested before they know they are infected so mild are the symptoms and total deaths are average – Interestingly in Sweden at the moment they are below average.
rab57wil
3 years ago
Well done for speaking up David, spot on. Dr Mike Yeadon is a star.
Keith Mansfield
3 years ago
Great article. But isn’t the next step that we will soon be able to automate trust, mathematically, through decentralized technologies and blockchain-like structures? Or is that just a utopian dream?
Definitely. The problem is that digital systems, even “AI” (powerful pattern matching) are dumb and their effectiveness relies on the specification to which they have been built, or the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the data with which they have been trained (AI). So there is always the problem of human mistakes being engineered into a system. The great advantage of actual humans is their flexibility & adaptability and the right place for machines is the boring but detail-oriented tasks with which most people struggle.
Stephen Hoffman
3 years ago
Neil Ferguson’s fantasy computer modelling and fifty other forms of big-tech fairy dust got us into our present mess. But Timandra Harkness is still looking for some variation on the big-data approach to get us out of it. All we need is a government which can earn our “trust,” she says. How silly. Government “trust” won’t get us back our stolen rights. Only some backbone will.
John Stone
3 years ago
Since when did we have a government we trust about anything?
Dan Poynton
3 years ago
The true Faithful of the Algorithm! There’s a good girl, download the app and plug yourself into the matrix. I’m wondering who needs Communist surveillance states and the NSA when you’ve got the good old BBC?
C Arros
3 years ago
Very exciting, – and I would guess expensive -, stuff all these technological possibilities. Imagine it would be possible to tell me that I’m getting Alzheimer…, but that wouldn’t change anything about the fact, that after now indeed years of telling doctors about my suffering from incontinence nothing has been offered that would have helped to maintain at least a minimum of quality of life… So why should I get excited and involved in all these technologies, if they just eat further into the limited budget thereby not leaving enough to offer solutions for even rather trivial matters, but which as a matter of fact can make life hard to bear?
Unfortunately the building block of test and trace which is the test itself is about as accurate as sticking your finger in the air. Test and trace is a fools errand and can never work in a western democracy where everything is by consent. The UK system is actually the best in Europe which is saying something! Far better to follow Mike Yeadon’s view and remove community testing altogether and direct it to healthcare settings. I thought this a while ago and good to see someone far cleverer than me has actually said it.
Trust in politicians has never been great in recent times and that situation is exacerbated by the woeful gotcha MSM we have to put up with nowadays.
Rebuilding any trust in politicians will be a hard slog after this so called pandemic. There is good evidence that we have been serially lied to and taken for fools by the govt, the opposition, and even worse the scientists.
Even worse they have use psychological messaging techniques to influence behaviours.
> Unfortunately the building block of test and trace which is the test itself is about as accurate as sticking your finger in the air.
Evidence? David Spiegelhalter in the Indy: “The ONS survey [from June] did 112,000 tests and only got 50 positive tests out of it,” he said, noting that even if all of these were false positives, the rate would be under 0.05 per cent.”
The false positive rate of the UK test has yet to be made public but is to be believed to be around 0.8% At that level when (if) 500k tests per day are reached the false positives will be 4000 per day. This isn’t peanuts. It also means if the positive test count falls under 4000 per day then the test has the potential to be 100% false positives. The possibility of the testing through the summer being significantly false positive due to the low prevalence is real. The Daxx test has a FPR of 1.8%.
The issue around residual inactive virus and low presence at a level below a transmittable level remains. There are also issues around the process. Last week saw a lab supervisor resign because the testing process he was supervising was concerning not least because of the skill level of the operators which has deteriorated since the universities went back and the summer staff were no longer available. There is a risk of contamination in the process. Mike Yeadon believes the FPR when everything is considered in the round could now be as high as 3%
My concern remains that of misdiagnosis and mistreatment due to false positive test results and the other issues.
I would also add that at the beginning of September the govt changed the testing protocol to include the retesting of weak positives. Not in the media and no confirmation I can find that it actually happened.
I think disclosing ID to police from the track and trace results is a serious breach of trust .Presumably we will be coerced into having the NHS Covid App becos restuarants will start to refuse entry without it. The NHS states on the App- it may disclose your details to local authorities(presumably to enforce self isolation.) The behaviour of the police in fining students £10000 for breaching regs and partying is a signal of the disproportionate authoritaranism now being wielded towards the public. ..who are frightened of not just Covid butnow of deliberate Govt.misinformation. They are stressed and deprived of family and social support and till now have largely behaved responsibly. We need to recognise and resist this normalisation of a bio state which intervenes in every aspect of ones life-and appears to want to be criminalising the public with the help of technological surveillance. I will provide as few details of myself or others health status or mobility as possible but I will make moral decisions regardless of the states interference.
> The NHS states on the App- it may disclose your details to local authorities(presumably to enforce self isolation.)
No, they say:
Hmmm… I have been put off Test and Trace for exactly the reasons the author notes in her first paragraph and while I think the government has performed poorly in this area, one has to say that they have been blindsided by the fact they’re fighting a pandemic which no-one (still?) knows much about and also are quite rightly looking at some bigger pictures regarding Brexit and a potential global slump, as well as lunatic SAGE advisers who are so far down their self-righteous restrictions routes they do not dare to retract or revise their postulations. I think the best Test and Trace is the one where the Nightingale hospitals are used solely for Covid patients, so allowing normal hospitals to function for all the other myriad afflictions our human race is susceptible to. Then protect the elderly and symptom-full people, so allowing everyone else to get on with their lives as espoused in the Great Barrington Declaration. Then whether the Test & Trace app works or not, is adhered to, heeded or used would become irrelevant.
We are sold this app on the basis that no personal data is collected. It has a phone number and not even a full post code if you decide not to put it in. But of course, we get a call if identified and then all the personal data is collected. It is completely pointless unless there is regular testing because people can be infectious and not know if. When tested and found positive they might not be infectious because the test is so unreliable. It is mass intrusion in our lives by the state.
Until lockdown I could book a doctor’s or nurse’s appointment using an app. That is no longer available – presumably due to COVID. Not all uses of digital technology have advanced recently.
Contact Tracing for Covid19 IS A JOKE!.
Ms. Harkness is yet another scientifically-challenged journalist who still believes that Covid testing is turning up “CASES.”
It is not. The RT-PCR should be immediately banned given the False Positivity of up to 94%.
WOULD YOU QUARANTINE YOURSELF IF YOU WERE COMPLETELY ASYMPTOMATIC AND HAD A POSITIVE COVID19 SWAB?
> The RT-PCR should be immediately banned given the False Positivity of up to 94%.
What is your evidence for this? The FP rate is nowhere near that high. Are you referring to Dominic Raab’s flub about border testing? Turns out he was actually talking about the false negative rate, see Fullfact’s “Dominic Raab did not say Covid-19 tests have a 93% false positive rate” article.
Having had the virus or at least retrospectively all the symptoms in February before it became a legal matter these dilemmas should not arise – The lawyers advice is don’t talk to the authorities unless you have to and of course never admit guilt as most convictions depend on confession – It is satisfying to tell any authority asking that the only person who has been close enough to you to need to self isolate is them – A few months ago it was apparent that the danger of this virus was similar to flu and now the comparison particularly that the average death is 82 is now more similar to the common cold which is also a Covid and also commonly kills at about that age and similarly always with co morbidities – So best to do what you would do if you had a cold – Our newly authoritarian government is overreacting because this is a very weak epidemic shown by most needing to be tested before they know they are infected so mild are the symptoms and total deaths are average – Interestingly in Sweden at the moment they are below average.
Well done for speaking up David, spot on. Dr Mike Yeadon is a star.
Great article. But isn’t the next step that we will soon be able to automate trust, mathematically, through decentralized technologies and blockchain-like structures? Or is that just a utopian dream?
It’s just a utopian dream.
Definitely. The problem is that digital systems, even “AI” (powerful pattern matching) are dumb and their effectiveness relies on the specification to which they have been built, or the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the data with which they have been trained (AI). So there is always the problem of human mistakes being engineered into a system. The great advantage of actual humans is their flexibility & adaptability and the right place for machines is the boring but detail-oriented tasks with which most people struggle.
Neil Ferguson’s fantasy computer modelling and fifty other forms of big-tech fairy dust got us into our present mess. But Timandra Harkness is still looking for some variation on the big-data approach to get us out of it. All we need is a government which can earn our “trust,” she says. How silly. Government “trust” won’t get us back our stolen rights. Only some backbone will.
Since when did we have a government we trust about anything?
The true Faithful of the Algorithm! There’s a good girl, download the app and plug yourself into the matrix. I’m wondering who needs Communist surveillance states and the NSA when you’ve got the good old BBC?
Very exciting, – and I would guess expensive -, stuff all these technological possibilities. Imagine it would be possible to tell me that I’m getting Alzheimer…, but that wouldn’t change anything about the fact, that after now indeed years of telling doctors about my suffering from incontinence nothing has been offered that would have helped to maintain at least a minimum of quality of life… So why should I get excited and involved in all these technologies, if they just eat further into the limited budget thereby not leaving enough to offer solutions for even rather trivial matters, but which as a matter of fact can make life hard to bear?
Pardon, did you say something?