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by orasis 2237 days ago
We need to be driving test numbers up until only 3-5% are showing positive in order to be confident about low prevalence in an area. I don't see a problem with false positives encouraging asymptomatic people to get tested - it's as good of a sub-population as any.
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The project lead of Singapore's TraceTogether initiative goes into detail about the problems with an automated system, and why a human-in-the-loop is ideally required to evaluate the type of contact and make a determination.

A determination around being a close contact results in 14-day isolation regardless of symptoms, presumably because you may initially test negative before moving into an infectious and asymptomatic or symptomatic phase.

https://blog.gds-gov.tech/automated-contact-tracing-is-not-a...

It's worth re-iterating how unreliable bluetooth signal strength is in estimating proximity.

One recent data point using the CovidSafe app is here: https://twitter.com/jim_mussared/status/1256199078314078210

Exploration around the defects in that app is ongoing here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u5a5ersKBH6eG362atALrzuX...

14 day isolation was a policy choice. There is no reason that other municipalities do the same. We can discover a balance that keeps local r < 1.0