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The health secretary confirmed that a new contact tracking app to control the coronavirus outbreak on the Isle of Wight will be piloted this week, despite concerns that its centralized configuration carries privacy risks and will reduce acceptance.
Matt Hancock said there had been “great enthusiasm” on the island off the south coast of England for the idea of testing the new application, which will alert users if they have been around someone with the Covid-19 virus.
Having stopped trying to track each case in March, when the virus began to spread freely in the population, the government is now recruiting what the health secretary called an “army” of human contact trackers. These will work alongside the new app, in an attempt to establish how and where the disease is spreading.
Users experiencing symptoms will be asked to report the app and then offered a test. Access to the application will initially be offered to NHS staff on the island, with members of the public receiving a letter Thursday urging them to download the app and join the trial.
Questions have been raised about the effectiveness of the app. A report published Monday in the Health Service Journal, which the government flatly denied as “false,” cited sources claiming that it was unsuitable for inclusion in the NHS application library itself, which had failed basic safety tests. cyber and it was still “hesitant”. . He also said there were concerns about how users’ privacy would be protected once they recorded symptoms and became traceable.
The NHS’s decision to adopt a centralized approach has also been criticized. Alan Davidson and Marshall Erwin of the Mozilla web charity said: “The biggest problem … is that it would expand the government’s access to the ‘social graph’: data about you, your relationships, and your ties to others.
Regardless of the details, we know that this social graph data is almost impossible to truly anonymize. It will provide information about you that is very sensitive and can be easily abused for a large number of unwanted purposes. “
Apple and Google proposed a decentralized alternative, in which contact tracking would be done on individual phones, rather than on the NHS servers, and that would allow them to register the large number of users it needs.
But Matthew Gould, executive director of the NHS digital arm, defended the decision to opt for a centralized application, telling the parliament’s joint human rights committee on Monday: “Even if the acceptance rate is 20%, that will it gives important information about how the virus is spreading. With 40 or 50% it will make a big difference. “
Hancock elaborated on the app at Monday’s Downing Street daily press conference, where he also confirmed that the total number of deaths reported by Covid-19 was now 28,734, an increase from 288.
The secretary of health described the creation of a contact location system as “a great national company of unprecedented scale and complexity.” He said he expected to have the system up and running in the middle of this month.
Hancock had previously said that 18,000 contact trackers might be needed, but said he would adjust that number if a new survey showed that the virus was more prevalent than previously thought. The Office for National Statistics is conducting a large-scale survey in an attempt to create a clearer picture of how many people have contracted the virus.
Hancock was accompanied by Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England Jonathan Van-Tam, who gave an update on the five government tests to lift the blockade, which has been in operation for six weeks.
He said that while the data showed the government was in a good position to pass the first test, a sustained drop in daily deaths, there was still a deep scientific discussion on the fifth test about avoiding a second spike.
He added that the government wanted to see the number of new Covid-19 cases drop before considering it safe to lift the restrictions. “New cases need to be further reduced,” he said.
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