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Ben Snaith

Reports to help combat COVID-19 - The Keyword - 0 views

www.blog.google/...-19-community-mobility-reports

Data Mobility Coronavirus

shared by Ben Snaith on 11 May 20 - No Cached
  • For example, this information could help officials understand changes in essential trips that can shape recommendations on business hours or inform delivery service offerings.
  • Ultimately, understanding not only whether people are traveling, but also trends in destinations, can help officials design guidance to protect public health and essential needs of communities.
  • The Community Mobility Reports are powered by the same world-class anonymization technology that we use in our products every day. For these reports, we use differential privacy, which adds artificial noise to our datasets enabling high quality results without identifying any individual person. 
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  • The insights are created with aggregated, anonymized sets of data from users who have turned on the Location History setting, which is off by default.
Ben Snaith

Greater Manchester STILL doesn't know how many people are testing positive for COVID-19... - 0 views

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/...ter-still-doesnt-know-18288943

Coronavirus Data Local-Government

shared by Ben Snaith on 26 May 20 - No Cached
  • But one exasperated local source said the problem lay with the data itself, which they said cannot currently be broken down to local level and therefore cannot be usefully shared with councils.
  • The Department of Health and Social Care said it was 'actively working on a solution to share anonymised data with our stakeholders', with councils a top priority. It said it had been engaging with the Local Government Association on the issue.
  • It is understood Greater Manchester is now trying to persuade the government to merge the two testing systems together in a partnership, so that public health departments can get hold of all the relevant results.
fionntan

Use of apps in the COVID-19 response and the loss of privacy protection | Nature Medicine - 0 views

www.nature.com/...s41591-020-0928-y

Coronavirus Research Apps Nature

shared by fionntan on 27 May 20 - No Cached
Ben Snaith liked it
  • fionntan on 27 May 20
     
    Mobile apps provide a convenient source of tracking and data collection to fight against the spread of COVID-19. We report our analysis of 50 COVID-19-related apps, including their use and their access to personally identifiable information, to ensure that the right to privacy and civil liberties are protected.
Ben Snaith

Statistics Estonia: people stay in one location 20 hours per day on average - Statistic... - 0 views

www.stat.ee/news-release-2020-047

Data Coronavirus Mobility

shared by Ben Snaith on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • Statistics Estonia’s mobility analysis revealed that since the emergency situation and movement restrictions were implemented, people living in Estonia stay in their main location 20 hours per day on average. The distance covered in one day as well as the number of trips has decreased. The revised analysis shows that the share of people staying in their main location has increased by 16 percentage points, which means that an estimated 200,000 more people have stayed local.
  • For the mobility analysis, Statistics Estonia used aggregate tables of the movement analysis of mobile phone numbers, which were received from mobile operators. These were used as the basis for calculating the rate for staying local for the whole country.
Ben Snaith

About this Project | COVID-19 County Social Distancing Reporter - 0 views

covid19.cambersystems.com/about

Data Mobility Coronavirus

shared by Ben Snaith on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • In achieving these goals, we started by applying our experience at Camber and the experience of the epidemiological teams, and taking into account the differences between aggregated human movements that are predictable and movements that are not, notably socialization. Presenting both radius of gyration and entropy gives a more complete picture of socialization patterns within a county. For example, a high RoG and low entropy could indicate a population that needs to travel far to go to work or the grocery store, but are otherwise staying home; a low RoG and high entropy could indicate a more dense area where people are staying near home but are still moving in their neighborhood. Both are important signals needing different interventions.*
    • Ben Snaith
      Ben Snaith on 27 May 20
       
      yo @fionntan this seems helpful, I just don't really get it
  • In collaboration with epidemiologists within the COVID-19 Mobility Data Network including the Harvard School of Public Health, Direct Relief, Princeton, and many others, we built this dashboard as an enhanced offering to public health officials that builds further on others’ early work product. This effort provides a more accurate and actionable understanding of the effectiveness of social distancing and other policy interventions aimed at reducing or slowing the spread of COVID-19.
  • In developing this dashboard, we began with several goals. First, we worked with public-health researchers to understand what they needed and provide them with the most-important data and metrics. Second, we worked with experts to ensure that we used privacy-forward practices in developing these metrics. Finally, we aim to iterate based on new information and feedback from the public and researchers to continue to aid the fight against COVID-19.
Ben Snaith

Safe distancing tool for rail and metro operators launched - Smart Cities World - 0 views

www.smartcitiesworld.net/...-metro-operators-launched-5309

Mobility Coronavirus

shared by Ben Snaith on 29 May 20 - No Cached
  • It shows how people move into, out of and between stations, average wait times, and even occupancy on trains. It monitors crowd density in specific areas, such as concourse, stairwell, platform and carriage, and can be expanded to provide station-wide density and flow insights.
  • Alarms and actions are triggered when threshold limits are reached, enabling rapid responses, like directing passenger flows, closing turnstiles and updating digital signage, among others. In addition, operators could also improve their sanitation responsiveness, directing teams to where cleaning is most needed.
  • To help passengers plan their journeys, operators can also share data via websites, apps and other platforms. This information enables travellers to choose a less-crowded station or platform or alter their travel time to reduce risks and maintain social distance.
Ben Snaith

When there's an app that can save lives, there will be no need to download it out of a ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...load-it-out-of-a-sense-of-duty

Coronavirus Contact-Tracing Privacy

shared by Ben Snaith on 01 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Still, it can’t do any harm to download the app, right? Actually, no. Unless the government compels employers to pay people to quarantine for 14 days every time they receive an alert, people may feel pressured to ignore the alerts and keep working, even if that risks their health and that of their contacts. Also, not every worker is entitled to sick pay. Those are policy problems, not an app problem, but if we don’t solve them, the app won’t work and the virus will continue to spread.
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.
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.
Ben Snaith

'Immunity passports' in the context of COVID-19 - 0 views

www.who.int/...rts-in-the-context-of-covid-19

Coronavirus Immunity-Passports

shared by Ben Snaith on 14 May 20 - No Cached
  • At this point in the pandemic, there is not enough evidence about the effectiveness of antibody-mediated immunity to guarantee the accuracy of an “immunity passport” or “risk-free certificate.” People who assume that they are immune to a second infection because they have received a positive test result may ignore public health advice. The use of such certificates may therefore increase the risks of continued transmission. As new evidence becomes available, WHO will update this scientific brief.
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