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Ben Snaith

Which Covid-19 Data Can You Trust? - 2 views

hbr.org/...ch-covid-19-data-can-you-trust

Data Mobility Coronavirus Contact-Tracing Health Algorithms Models

shared by Ben Snaith on 11 May 20 - No Cached
  • In a crisis situation like the one we are in, data can be an essential tool for crafting responses, allocating resources, measuring the effectiveness of interventions, such as social distancing, and telling us when we might reopen economies. However, incomplete or incorrect data can also muddy the waters, obscuring important nuances within communities, ignoring important factors such as socioeconomic realities, and creating false senses of panic or safety, not to mention other harms such as needlessly exposing private information.
  • Unfortunately, many of these technological solutions — however well intended — do not provide the clear picture they purport to. In many cases, there is insufficient engagement with subject-matter experts, such as epidemiologists who specialize in modeling the spread of infectious diseases or front-line clinicians who can help prioritize needs. But because technology and telecom companies have greater access to mobile device data, enormous financial resources, and larger teams of data scientists, than academic researchers do, their data products are being rolled out at a higher volume than high quality studies.
  • To some extent, all data risk breaching the privacy of individual or group identities, but publishing scorecards for specific neighborhoods risks shaming or punishing communities, while ignoring the socioeconomic realities of people’s lives that make it difficult for them to stay home.
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  • Even more granular examples, such as footfalls at identifiable business locations, risks de-identifying religious groups; patients visiting cancer hospitals, HIV clinics, or reproductive health clinics; or those seeking public assistance. The medical and public health communities long ago deemed the un-masking of such information without consent unacceptable, but companies have recently been releasing it on publicly available dashboards.
  • Until we know more about how these changing movement patterns impact epidemiological aspects of the disease, we should use these data with caution.
  • Simply presenting them, or interpreting them without a proper contextual understanding, could inadvertently lead to imposing or relaxing restrictions on lives and livelihoods, based on incomplete information.
  • In the absence of a tightly coupled testing and treatment plan, however, these apps risk either providing false reassurance to communities where infectious but asymptomatic individuals can continue to spread disease, or requiring an unreasonably large number of people to quarantine. The behavioral response of the population to these apps is therefore unknown and likely to vary significantly across societies.
  • Some contact-tracing apps follow black-box algorithms, which preclude the global community of scientists from refining them or adopting them elsewhere. These non-transparent, un-validated interventions — which are now being rolled out (or rolled back) in countries such as China, India, Israel and Vietnam — are in direct contravention to the open cross-border collaboration that scientists have adopted to address the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • pidemiological models that can help predict the burden and pattern of spread of Covid-19 rely on a number of parameters that are, as yet, wildly uncertain. We still lack many of the basic facts about this disease, including how many people have symptoms, whether people who have been infected are immune to reinfection, and — crucially — how many people have been infected so far. In the absence of reliable virological testing data, we cannot fit models accurately, or know confidently what the future of this epidemic will look like for all these reasons, and yet numbers are being presented to governments and the public with the appearance of certainty
  • Telenor, the Norwegian telco giant has led the way in responsible use of aggregated mobility data from cell phone tower records. Its data have been used, in close collaboration with scientists and local practitioners, to model, predict, and respond to outbreaks around the world. Telenor has openly published its methods and provided technological guidance on how telco data can be used in public health emergencies in a responsible, anonymized format that does not risk de-identification.
  • The Covid-19 Mobility Data Network, of which we are part, comprises a voluntary collaboration of epidemiologists from around the world analyzes aggregated data from technology companies to provide daily insights to city and state officials from California to Dhaka, Bangladesh.
fionntan

Publishing with purpose? Reflections on designing with standards and locating user enga... - 0 views

www.timdavies.org.uk/...s-and-locating-user-engagement

shared by fionntan on 12 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Purpose should govern the choice of dataset to focus on Standards should be the primary guide to the design of the datasets User engagement should influence engagement activities ‘on top of’ published data to secure prioritised outcomes New user needs should feed into standard extension and development User engagement should shape the initiatives built on top of data
  • The call for ‘raw data now‘ was not without purpose: but it was about the purpose of particular groups of actors: not least semantic web reseachers looking for a large corpus of data to test their methods on. This call configured open data towards the needs and preferences of a particular set of (technical) actors, based on the theory that they would then act as intermediaries, creating a range of products and platforms that would serve the purpose of other groups. That theory hasn’t delivered in practice
  • They describe a process that started with a purpose (“get better bids on contract opportunities”), and then engaged with vendors to discuss and test out datasets that were useful to them.
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  • But in seeking to be generally usable, standard are generally not tailored to particular combinations of local capacity and need. (This pairing is important: if resource and capacity were no object, and each of the requirements of a standard were relevant to at least one user need, then there would be a case to just implement the complete standard. This resource unconstrained world is not one we often find ourselves in.)
  • The Open Contracting Partnership, which has encouraged governments to purposely prioritise publication of procurement data for a number of years now,
    • fionntan
      fionntan on 12 Jun 20
       
      how does the open contracting partnership relate to models?
  • The Open Contracting Partnership, which has encouraged governments to purposely prioritise publication of procurement data for a number of years now,
davetaz

ISB1523: Anonymisation Standard for Publishing Health and Social Care Data - NHS Digital - 1 views

digital.nhs.uk/...ng-health-and-social-care-data

NHS Coronavirus Anonymisation Open-Data

shared by davetaz on 27 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • ISB1523: Anonymisation Standard for Publishing Health and Social Care Data This process standard for publishing health and social care data provides an agreed and standardised approach to anonymisation.
  • Although the law makes a clear distinction between identifying and non-identifying data, where that line should be drawn may be far from clear in practice. That is why this anonymisation standard for publishing health and social care data is needed. This process standard provides an agreed and standardised approach, grounded in the law, enabling organisations to: distinguish between identifying and non-identifying information deploy a standard approach and a set of standard tools to anonymise information to ensure that, as far as it is reasonably practicable to do so, information published does not identify individuals.
Ben Snaith

On the road again? Monitoring traffic following the easing of lockdown restrictions | U... - 0 views

www.ubdc.ac.uk/...asing-of-lockdown-restrictions

Mobility Data Coronavirus

shared by Ben Snaith on 15 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Looking at the news across the UK, there are indications that the easing of lockdown restrictions has led to serious traffic problems. For instance, police were forced to close Falkirk Council’s Roughmute recycling centre two hours after opening it due to traffic building up on roads approaching the site. In Milton Keynes, IKEA was forced to close its car park just two hours after opening due to traffic volumes. Transport Scotland indicated a 60% increase in traffic on Saturday 30th May, compared to the previous Saturday, with traffic at the tourist and leisure hotspot of Loch Lomond up by 200%.
  • There are various ways to measure traffic volumes. Here, we look at Split Cycle Offset Optimisation Technique (SCOOT) data. The data is gathered from detectors installed at traffic lights. The purpose of the system is to coordinate traffic lights to improve the flow of vehicles. We accessed data on Glasgow’s traffic through an API provided by Glasgow City Council.
  • The aggregate pattern hides substantial variation at the different locations where the measurements are taken, which could explain why people may have seen large increases in traffic in their local area.
fionntan

How can coronavirus models get it so wrong? - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...navirus-models-get-it-so-wrong

Coronavirus Models Open-Data

shared by fionntan on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • One moment the prime minister, Boris Johnson, was asking people with symptoms to stay home for seven days; a few days later, he had ordered a lockdown. What changed was data from Italy’s experience of the pandemic, in which more people were critically ill than anticipated, and from the NHS about its inability to cope if the same should happen in the UK.
Ben Snaith

Open Data Being Used to Help Track COVID-19 in Scotland - 0 views

digit.fyi/elp-track-covid-19-in-scotland

Coronavirus Data Health Statistics

shared by Ben Snaith on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • “In a perfect world we would have data at a regional, or even more granular level, and cover not just broad-brush numbers of positive and negative tests and deaths. It would have more-localised data, breakdowns by gender and age bands. It would cover numbers of ITU patients, numbers of people recovered, the number of test kits we have, staffing, ventilators etc,” Watt says.
davetaz

Potential Coronavirus (COVID-19) symptoms reported through NHS Pathways and 111 online ... - 0 views

digital.nhs.uk/...latest

NHS Coronavirus Anonymisation Open-Data

shared by davetaz on 27 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Potential Coronavirus (COVID-19) symptoms reported through NHS Pathways and 111 online
  • Summary Data published on potential COVID-19 symptoms reported through NHS Pathways and 111 online Dashboard shows the total number of NHS Pathways triages through 111 and 999, and online assessments in 111 online which have received a potential COVID-19 final disposition. This data is based on potential COVID-19 symptoms reported by members of the public to NHS Pathways through NHS 111 or 999 and 111 online,  and is not based on the outcomes of tests for coronavirus. This is not a count of people.
Ben Snaith

Digital immunity passport 'the lesser of two evils,' says UK startup boss - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.eu/...ils-argues-uk-start-up-founder

Coronavirus Data Privacy Immunity-Passports Digital-Identity Biometrics

shared by Ben Snaith on 14 May 20 - No Cached
  • The idea behind so-called digital “passports” is that they would allow people who have recovered from the coronavirus to signal their immunity and thus move around freely, enabling economies to open up. But there are fears such a system, which is at a preliminary stage of discussion with the developer, could lead to discrimination, create perverse incentives to get infected, and violate privacy.
  • The scheme also relies on reliable antibody testing and enough kits for large-scale testing — neither of which exist, yet. Not to mention that health experts don’t know whether immunity to the coronavirus even exists and, if it does, how long it lasts. In late April, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned against a passport scheme on the basis that “there is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.”
  • Onfido’s technology would work by first verifying someone’s identity — by comparing a picture or video of their face against a picture of their identity card — and then linking that to a coronavirus test result. People would then be able to bring up a QR code on an app or a browser signalling their immunity status just by taking a picture of their face.
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  • As to privacy, Kassai says data in Onfido's system would be stored on “a private server for an individual,” that can only be accessed with the user's face. "No private business, no government should really be, there's no need for them to hold your personal data. You as a consumer should," he says.
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