Last week, the UK contact dection phone system “pinged” one half million residents who were then forced into isolation for ten days.
Even the Prime Minister, who was hospitalized for Covid, and is also fully vaccinated, was forced in to 10 day quarantine because of a smart phone ping. Utterly pointless.
The system grew so out of control, that supermarkets are running out of food, and petrol stations are running out of gasoline, because so many workers were forced to isolate at home.
This fiasco has been a major screw up. Smart phone tracing apps sound wonderful, in theory, but in practice they find few cases that were not found with other methods, and in here in the UK, the system has proved a disaster. They have a high false negative and high false positive rate as well.
LONDON, July 22 (Reuters) – Daily contact testing will be rolled out to workplaces in Britain’s food sector so staff who have been ‘pinged’ by the COVID-19 app can keep working if they test negative rather than isolating, the government said on Thursday.
Supermarkets have said some products are in short supply and petrol stations have been forced to close after the official health app told hundreds of thousands of workers to isolate following contact with someone with the virus. read more
Source: UK to launch daily COVID tests in food sector to tackle ‘pingdemic’ | Reuters
The proper description of this begins with “cluster” and ends with a word rhyming with “duck”.
Smart phone contact detection and tracing is as useful as most of the NPIs, which is to say – basically useless.
How will the UK fix this? By doing Covid-tests daily for all food sector workers. Thanks to Bayes Theorem, it is likely the majority of “positive” results will be false positive.
The experts have learned nothing.
