Oh oh.

[Suff]

Yes I got the point about alarming people. I can't see how this will provide more than a general guide as to how it is spreading.

Perhaps the apps in use in SK may help and perhaps this is what the NHS has bought into.

That being said, how do they intend to do this? Make the App mandatory when leaving the house? Insist your Bluetooth is on and broadcasting? Is the NHS aware this is the #1 vector into phones for mal actors?

I'm back to the whole business of people reporting "we did something" rather than sitting down and working out what might work best.

[TheOstrich]

Trial next week; there you go …...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52521526

They have scrapped most of the ferries between the south coast and the IOW (lack of demand other than goods vehicles) so there is an element of self-containment.

[cromwell]

Right. It's not entirely clear to me whether this is a staggered "go live" implementation or whether the IoW is a test site.
Good luck with it whichever it is (that's sincere btw).

[Workingman]

From what I can gather it is only a test on the IoW. But following links and chasing the numbers it all looks bit too aspirational and without much foundation.

Some 80% of mobile users have to download the app and be broadcasting on Bluetooth for it to work to its potential - that is somewhere between 36 to 39 million. That is a lot more than popular apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp. It is only a proximity test so that if you are in range you get a 'ping', the length of time and the conditions in which the contact took place are not taken into account. And the 'army' of tracers is 18,000 when the number of contacts could be in the millions. Then there is the level of nationwide testing being done to identify those who have the virus. The rise in infections has been floating up and down around the 5,000 per day for weeks. At current numbers every new positive will pass it on to 1.13 others before they are isolated. How many they 'ping' in that time is unknown but all will have to be traced and monitored / tested.

Given all that it might not take long for the system to become overwhelmed.

[Suff]

At these levels of numbers the only possible way to handle them is with a very large database and lots of very simple queries based on indexes. Anything else is going to overwhelm the hardware, let alone the team. Even then, the volume of checking and tracing could easily overwhelm a team of thousands in days.

We can see how it goes but one of my specialities, as an architect, was building storage structures for large databases with high volume hits. Sadly modern technology is so fast that software designers have become lazy in optimising to minimise storage impact so when they hit the wall they have to go right back to fundamentals and redesign.

[cromwell]

The amount of data will be a problem for certain.
I've just looked up the population of the Isle of Wight, it's about 140,000 people. It's a nice gentle introduction to test the app but scaling it up will be a challenge.

[Suff]

And, shazam, the NHS starts to spend more money building a second app, using Google and Apple API calls, in case the politicians do a U turn.

Your NHS money at work...

They also posted the code for the current NHS app on github. Hoping the open source community will fix all the broken stuff? It might be the only way it actually works.

[cromwell]

And, shazam, the NHS starts to spend more money building a second app, using Google and Apple API calls, in case the politicians do a U turn.

When it comes to IT politicians probably don't know which way is up. They are relying on the advice of experts, or people who should be proficient. The NHS is building a second app to do the same job? That's a bit unique. Presumably this one won't hold a vast central database, which would remove the biggest problem.

They also posted the code for the current NHS app on github. Hoping the open source community will fix all the broken stuff? It might be the only way it actually works.

Very likely.

I did read that the trial had hit early snags but you would expect that.

[Workingman]

Well the idea that using the apple and google app would allow commonality between countries / regions has gone out of the window. Germany has ditched its original app and will release a new one and France is going the in-house route next week. Then there are all those places who cannot be arsed.

It's all a bit too little and too late. We should have isolated all those inbound from the start and continued to track and trace, as best we could, those we already knew about. But we are where we are.

New confirmed cases are still stubbornly around the 4,500 to 5,000 per day mark and it would only need each one of them to ping two others for the system to be overloaded in just a few days. The daily death rate, however, is slowly coming down, though it will still take two to three weeks for it to drop to about 250 at which point we would be able to manage more easily. That is a good sign and shows that some of our medical interventions are working.

There might be light at the end of the tunnel after all, but we must be careful that we do not do anything to extinguish it.

[Suff]

My take is that full freedom to work and travel will have tracing as an integral part. I expect to hear about this as it starts to become available.

It is all a mess. But then governments were never organised to deal with this and if anyone thinks WW2 wasn't a mess at the outset they are kidding themselves. The government was in shambles, the country scrambling to catch up. You see there had been a couple of decades of relative peace and nobody was organised.

Contrast today. Nearly 80 years with no real crisis to deal with. Not only is nobody prepared, there is almost nobody left who can even remember what it was like the last time we had a catastrophe.

We are 2-3 weeks behind France, Spain and Italy in infections and actions and locking down. I expect things to follow a similar trajectory, although Spain was, at this stage, reporting far more new cases and far more new deaths than the UK. Also they only reported hospital deaths.

Time, patience, resignation. Tools to deal with it.

At least I'm getting a lot done in the house/garden. Silver linings.