| >It was also used to shut down businesses, anyone could say they had covid, report it on the NHS phone app and then that would trigger all those people in the vicinity to have to isolate I had significant misgivings about the app and it's efficacy. It is those misgivings that mean I don't believe this is an accurate representation. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, a positive case report on the app had to be backed by a PCR result, which required a code provided on a positive PCR test. A bad actor as you describe would have only one shot at a malicious shut down (and would actually need to be Covid+ to do it). Secondly, the exposure limit was... generous. Proximity and duration had to be sufficient to form a close contact that would then be advised to self isolate and seek a test. People walking past a bad actor loitering outside a shopping centre would not meet this criteria. The shop keeper would... ...but shop keepers, retail staff et al by and large did not have the app. Employers were actively preventing their employees from downloading the application to prevent having to close for staff shortages while they were advised to isolate. Ignoring all of this, you get into the crux of the app with the "check ins". All venues were meant to enforce the "check in" procedure - in actuality, it was pretty much only restaurants that did so. Even if you "checked in" to a venue, _you had no ability to check out_ so that if a positive case was reported on the same day you happened to be at a venue, even hours apart, you would be flagged. This meant that every positive venue ping had to be reviewed by a person, who would be tasked with reviewing which of the contacts in the venue should be contact traced. The criteria for doing so was opaque - and without the knowledge of what time people left vs arrived - and the actual device:device exposure being invisible to the contract tracer - we can only surmise that an element of inference and good old fashioned guess work was at play. And as was publicised at the time - the contract tracers found themselves with very little work to do. >Should I also mention the Prime Minister was telling everyone to get onto Zoom for their meetings and then later on a zero click zero day exploit in Zoom surface which conveniently had given GCHQ enough time to hoover up data off plenty of systems. LOL The Prime Minister has repeatedly demonstrated himself to be fundamentally incapable of understanding even the most basic aspects of his job, let alone technology. Hanlon's Razor comes to mind here. |
All they had to do was do a test, type in the code and say it was positive, this is my point about the NHS app could have also required a photo of the positive test result but it didnt! I was poking around with it, and you could trigger the mobile app into telling you to self isolate simply by having one or two of the leading question symptoms, it was that "cautious".
So if earlier that day I spent my time around loads of people like in a shopping centre, on a military base, in a police station, I could get those people to self isolate by being in their vicinity and the app doing the rest, if they had that app, but the US Military bases here in the UK were doing their own US testing and where it was only a suspicion, they got US personnel to do an NHS test in order to keep the brits happy and the NHS happy. In actual fact Covid was ripping through some RAF USAF bases and the US mil were soiling their pants at how many active personnel were going down, what a way to take out the most powerful military on this planet!
Now it just so happened, you could also reset the app without any problem so you could rinse and repeat the next day!
> ...but shop keepers, retail staff et al by and large did not have the app. Employers were actively preventing their employees from downloading the application to prevent having to close for staff shortages while they were advised to isolate.
That would have been illegal in the UK, cant comment on how bad the US is.
> Hanlon's Razor
Yeah, if you are caught with your hands in the till put it down to Hanlon's Razor and say you found some money on the floor and you were putting it back! LOL
Looking at this globally, its fcuked the Just In Time global business sectors as we have seen with shortages et al and continue to see.