Please don't forget that there isn't a single UK-wide or England-wide police force. There are many small regional forces across England. Quite often they issue advice that's dumb. You'll see a police force's social media team retweeting a "scam alert" that's an obvious hoax.
So, we don't know why they've issued this advice and we don't know if they've based that on sensible factual information of some bit of misinformation.
It is a confusingly written article. The subtitle alone would be compatible with the interpretation that NPCC is just reporting on the policy of some of its member forces, rather than actually recommending them to adopt this policy; later on in the article, it implies that it is actually the NPCC's own policy not just NPCC reporting on its member forces' policies.
If the subtitle was changed to: "The National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) has confirmed it has recommended officers be told not to install the NHS Covid-19 app on their work smartphones" it would be clearer, if that is indeed the correct takeaway from this confusing article.
I know some countries told medical staff not to install these, on the basis that the medical staff would inevitably be in contact with a lot of people, but would (hopefully) be taking precautions.
A pessimist might consider that more of an attempt to hide a problem than to prevent one, especially considering that many of the medical staff probably will only be using some precautions instead of all of them.
My wife who works in the medical field and performs thirty minute to an hour long exams within a foot or two of a patient has been told that because she and the patient are both wearing surgical masks she doesn't have to self isolated if it's revealed the patient had COVID. I don't feel that's an actual representation of the reality, but instead a desire to minimize her downtime.
AFAIK, N95 and disposable gear are definitely enough - I'm going for my 3rd dental checkup since Covid tomorrow, and last I asked they had no infection in the clinic. But they're properly paranoid.
My SO is a DDS and has been back to practicing for over 3 months now. Her office has had no infections. My guess is the enhanced pre-screening, the closed wait area, no non-patients allowed, and all of the additional requirements of PPE have contributed very positively to keeping that infection potential suppressed. Staff have been tested a number of time due to concerns but they are strictly following the outlined protocol and have some enhanced requirements the owners have instituted to help keep it that way. This is in the US.
Not trying to jump on you, I recognize you're carrying on with your life and that's more than many can say, but is it really proper to be, "paranoid", opposed to taking reasonable precautions and moving forward based on a fair assessment of cost and benefit? This article and many comments paint police or medical personnel not self-isolating as if its a problem for which they should be ashamed. My wife is one of those working directly with Covid patients. Of course wearing a soaking wet mask in a closed room is skeptically effective. Sure when she suits up with real PPE it's effective, but that takes a lot of time she doesn't have, not to mention creates a ton of garbage. So if a patient isn't a known case, they don't bother. And the fact our whole family has the antibodies aside, of course she doesn't self-isolate when one of her patients is Covid positive. That would be absurd. Nobody else would be able to do her job. We need doctors, police officers, teachers, etc to carry on. We need to stop trying to shame them. These exceptions, like those pertaining to, "safe" lead levels in drinking water, are born of practicality. I wish people would try to think about Covid more pragmatically instead of dignifying paranoia as if it doesn't present a cost. Fact is - "Flatten the curve" means the same number of people will inevitably get Covid. Look, I know shaming each other is REALLY appealing but... We should probably start trying to weigh that universally recognized epidemiological fact against the perceived benefit of requiring public servants to self isolate, depriving children of an education, plunging millions into economic depression, or whatever.
Not sure what you mean as it was a bit of a long comment, but "taking reasonable precautions and moving forward based on a fair assessment of cost and benefit" is pretty much what I think that dental offices are doing. Why? Aerosols. Half of what they're doing is blowing saliva particles in a close space. Surgical mask is just not enough in this scenario. How far you go it's debatable - probably N95 and face shields are a minimum.
But that's just a rather isolated niche. As far as the rest of society goes, I'm pretty ok with masks and basic distancing.
Flatten the curve means new infections, not total cases. Its primary purpose is to slow the rate of spread to avoid health services becoming overwhelmed.
You could pursue an elimination strategy after flattening the curve, but generally the approach has been slow things down and keep them manageable until a vaccine is available.
Oh well so I have interpreted things wrong after all this time. Though sadly we still don't know if immunity can be achieved against covid19 and flattened curve can do the work.
This website is mostly wrong. It tells you 3.4% CFR for COVID-19 against 0.1% IFR of the common flu. Apples vs oranges. Flu mortality rates are mostly the same worldwide, this year's flu season was not much different to others. Higher in areas with no proper healthcare for seniors, lower in most other countries.
Flattening the curve means keeping R low, whilst raising the overall mortality, because the time of the wave is artificially enlarged. You keep the virus alife, esp. by closing the schools. The area under the wave is much larger with the flattening the curve strategy, even after several months it's not over yet. A normal wave is over after max 2 months. Politicians rely on people who cannot do the simplest math.
Surgical masks are apparently all that's required for a closed room with close proximity and a long duration according to the AHS (our local health authority). I am extraordinarily skeptical this will work in the long term as case rates rise (here in Alberta our numbers have been much lower than the US or UK).
My partner works directly with Covid positive patients. N95 mask (for staff and patient), full face shield, gloves, alcohol and that is about as good as it gets here. Since extra precautions were implemented I haven't heard of staff getting sick - there were a few cases when it all started.
The clinic has not issued any further restrictions on the personal lives of staff.
That's not really relevant to the point/counterpoint I was replying to, which was to do with personal risk. But I'm not sure it's true anyway; you can't transmit the virus to others if you're not infected! If everyone wore only N95s, transmission would certainly be lower than if everyone wore only surgical masks.
However, if it bothers you that much, you can wear a surgical mask over the N95. That's the best of both worlds, and strictly better than either option alone.
(All of this assumes valved N95s. Unvalved ones are more effective in both directions than surgical masks)
Yeah, all that would give a sense of security. As I said previously - it's gloves for the tech (not full length, just the usual nitrile ones), which were always standard, and a surgical mask for the tech and patient. No face shield or N95.
Could be mistrust about the anonymity properties of the system, but my guess is that they don't want too many officers to be confirmed as contacts, and thus be forced to self-isolate.
If you don't look at the problem, there is no problem!
If you assume that officers are following proper protocols (masks, gloves, proper hygiene) .. then I would say that it makes sense to not quarantine everyone that the officers come in contact with.
The problem is that policemen are well-connected nodes in the transmission graph. Those on fieldwork will meet a lot more random people any given day than you or I will on a shopping run.
I don’t remember anyone saying the pandemic would be solved in a few months if everyone followed proper protocols. It was about flattening the curve, which in fact should increase the length of the pandemic.
Indeed it was a massive messaging error. For maybe 20% more short term work we’d be in a new zealand/east asia situation. Summer was the time to do it.
At this point, I think it's pretty clear that New Zealand's approach couldn't be expected to lead to New Zealand-style results in places that aren't relatively small islands a thousand miles or so by sea from the nearest neighbour. There are just too many infections that slip through the net even after banning most people from travelling there and requiring returnees to quarantine in state-run facilities at their own expense for two weeks - it works for them, but the same level of per-capita leakage in a country with even ten times the population would cause such a stream of imported cases spreading Covid in the community that I don't think it'd ever be able to drop below level three restrictions, let alone beome Covid-free.
In reality the UK probably wouldn't even be able to manage that - for example, we have a constant stream of lorry drivers coming in from locations throughout Europe to destinations throughout the UK, many of them with absolutely vital goods, and that's a great way to spread Covid from country to country. Somewhere like the US would stand even less chance.
I’m originally from eastern canada. They have completely eliminated local transmission. And they have truck drivers bringing in goods, including from the US.
Haven’t heard of it as a source of transmission. Truck drivers generally don’t get off their shift and then go sing karaoke.
And I live now in Quebec, which got local transmission down to almost nothing. But then they opened bars for three months. I think if they had kept them closed a month longer and told the pop “get to zero and we can have a normal winter” we could have done it. Now we’re surging again.
There was no messaging error. Everyone was talking about flattening the curve, no one was talking about preventing cases. I wonder where this gaslighting comes from. It seems like we don't even need 1984 agencies to rewrite history, people do it themselves in their heads to keep up with the current agenda...
What I mean is a lot of people, like me, said flatten the curve, but would have wanted to eliminate it if it seemed reasonably possible. So I and other people who said the same thing now feel we made an error.
Flatten the curve started as a Twitter meme and only then spread to governments. I don’t think govts wanted to eliminate, but my point is I wish those who were in the forefront had sent a different message. I was looking at this from mid feb, before western governments were generally sending any message at all.
Surely they're identical? Flattening the curve means preventing as far as possible further community infections so that the infection rate stays low. Obviously it can't do anything about infections that have already happened, nor about new infections in situations where isolation is beyond practicable.
Containing the virus is the same, preventing ongoing community infections, etc.. Different words for the same overarching activity.
Maybe "containing" would have been a better description, arguably it wouldn't have allowed laxities to be introduced for economic reasons without it being more apparent; which goes against UK governments playbook it seems.
Did any countries public service messaging refer to "containing"?
Surely they are two absolutely different things with different goals. Nobody was talking about reducing the total number of cases, where did you get this idea from?
Drew Harris, a population health analyst at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia that is cited in this NYTimes article, has said:
>Important to remember that #Covid-19 epidemic control measures may only delay cases, not prevent.
and
>Without a vaccine, eventually everyone is likely to be exposed to the virus. Some won't get sick, some will have mild illness, some severe, and a few will die. The goal is to put this off for as long as possible so we have time to prepare and spread out the surge of cases.
It's reasonable to assume that Police has procedures that are followed, or at least that are followed infinitely better than the general public. And this has also to be balanced with the fact that the Police requires a high level of security (not a good idea for them to be tracked by a third party app).
It's much more important, because much more significant both in term of raw numbers and in term of risk of non compliance, to ensure that the general public follows the same: I was at the supermarket yesterday and the app told me that no less than 5 positive people were inside... with no consequences.
What's your evidence? Because police do have procedures that are internally enforced whereas the general public does not
and is not exactly keen on rules (as we've seen)
Sounds like some people are criticising for the sake of it because this is the Police...
Because the premise I was responding to was "It's reasonable to assume that Police has procedures that are followed, or at least that are followed infinitely better than the general public."
I didn't take that as meaning a specific police force, but rather, police in general. I was specifically responding to mytaylorrsrich's comment that people are reacting negatively to the police just because they are police, whereas my point was that they were believing that the police always held themselves to a higher standard just because they were police. I'm not convinced that is the case, and this link is a point of evidence to that effect.
The police do have procedures and do behave much better than the general public.
As also repeated the police has extra security constraints, which must be balanced with any benefits the tracking app bring. Clearly they think that allowing a third party app which goal is real-time tracking, on police phones has more downsides than upsides.
I don't know anything about American police and I don't care. This is not the topic of the discussion, which is about an UK tracking app and UK police forces.
I do think that shooting this advice against installing the app (on police phones) and my comments down is largely being obtuse because it's the police or because they don't want to acknowledge the specificities of police work.
And we might as well assume the sun rises in the west.
Saturday I saw a hospital worker (role unknown) with his mask in his hand. Not only that, but he was heading into the bathroom--a place you should be extra cautious about.
Other than that I have seen very good compliance by all medically trained people in healthcare facilities, sloppy compliance by those without medical training (receptionists etc.) I rather suspect he was not actually a medical worker despite being in the treatment area.
Coming from the USA perspective, this is absolutely laughable. It is very, very rare that I've seen a police officer in close interaction with anyone don a mask.
English hospitals already run out of tests a few times this year and people are going to Scottish hospitals to take tests. People in Wales are told to go to Scotland to take tests after being in contact with infected. Problem solved itself many times.
My guess is that contact times and distances are targeting unprotected citizens in their day to day. Police interact with a much more at risk target demographic but with better protection, protocols and awareness. This lack of calibration would probably trigger way more false positives
What do you base that on? I don’t think the police are wearing masks at any greater rate than any other profession, for example. What makes them less at risk?
I’d assume that police are being neither more nor less cautious than anyone else, on average, and are at relatively high risk just due to the nature of their jobs. If so it would be beneficial to the police and to everyone else for the police to use COVID contact tracing apps.
I'm not sure how frequently the codes are refreshed, but you could just hide a bluetooth receiver near the police station to get the daily codes for most officers, transmit that to your phone and have an app that tells you if a police officer is nearby.
A bit of background. Every app that is intended to be actually used by a people essentially must use the framework included in the OS. Otherwise it would run into various roadblocks like not being able to properly run in the background or not having the required BLE access. So that leaves you with using the cross platform exposure notification frameworks on both iOS and Android. The way those work well documented https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing. The "Temporary Expose Key" (TEK) changes exactly every 10 minutes. How often the BLE MAC changes depends on the OS, but that's around 10-20 minutes. As you have to change both "fingerprints" at the same time to prevent tracking across individual changes (See also [1]), in practice the sent TEK is changed at the BLE MAC change interval. So that's where to 10-20 minutes come from.
My first thought is that police policy may require security audits/etc. before they have any location tracking software installed on their phones that may potentially be abused to know the location of police.
The police ‘has better protection’, ‘knows better’ or whatever excuse they come up with. In the end it’s just that, rules are for plebs, not for the police.
I'm guessing it's because they come into contact with so many people every day. Especially those policing the recent anti-mask "protests" in Trafalgar Square. Half the force would be self-isolating at any given time.
However, it's just as likely that the app is spyware given that it doesn't, and can't link with any COVID tests you have via the NHS, only those done by Serco.
> I'm guessing it's because they come into contact with so many people every day. Especially those policing the recent anti-mask "protests" in Trafalgar Square. Half the force would be self-isolating at any given time.
This seems like the equivalent of saying that we can't have carbon monoxide alarms in this building because they keep going off.
The app has inherently limited accuracy and I think the algorithm it's using would likely flag anyone who goes anywhere near an event where a large number of people end up testing positive. It can't really tell the difference between, say, people attending a mass superspreading rave and mingling with contagious attendees with no protection, and police officers in PPE rounding up attendees who've been infected at the event but aren't contagious yet. It's just a fundamental limitation of using an automated app. This probably isn't a huge problem most of the time, but it seems like police using the app could rapidly deplete the ability to actually enforce Covid restrictions.
Couldn't the officers just ignore the app recommendation, but still use it? If they don't use it at all, they become breaks in the transmission graph.
In other words: if I was infected and attended a rave, a policeman interacted with me, and you interacted with that policeman two days later, you'd probably want to know about that fact and consider self-quarantining.
Yes, but I would hope that police are more aware of the situation and taking protective measures compared with say 2 people getting together for coffee. If this is the case the definition of contact needs to be different
> This seems like the equivalent of saying that we can't have carbon monoxide alarms in this building because they keep going off.
The comparison works if you add that the building is always filled with CO and that this is a known fact and that people in it are pros and take the appropriate measures. In such case, CO alarms are just noise.
Police evolve in a high risk environment and have procedure against that. Because of that and the security requirements of the Police, it has simply been concluded that the downsides of installing a third party tracker on a police phone outweighed the upsides.
I think the point worth making is that a bad tracing app is a lot worse than no app at all. It’ll incorrectly give license to people that have been exposed to continue going going out. It’ll incorrectly isolate people who haven’t been exposed, it’ll destroy businesses based on false positives and it’ll destroy the credibility of effective lockdown measures.
Given what we know of the uk governments competence, I would want a strong study indicating its effectiveness before I go anywhere near this.
Simple solution: don't force self isolation. If someone goes to a hospital where staff have been in contact with COVID, then they should take some steps to self isolate. That doesn't mean medical workers needs to stop work.
It's reasonable for an employer to decide what apps are allowed on a work phone, especially when it is a police work phone,and when the app's main purpose is tracking.
Now, in terms of protection, testing and self-isolation, the police are on the front line, like NHS staff are, and I think that they already have strict procedures that are strictly followed.
Therefore, all in all it sounds like that app on a police work phone is lots of risk, little benefits. They can install it on their personal phone if they wish.
If you're telling me to install it, but telling the cops not to install it, you're effectively telling me not to install it. The public is being told these apps are safe and privacy-preserving - if the precautions are not good enough for public officials of any kind, then they're not good enough for me.
The app is said to be secure and privacy preserving, so is it both secure and privacy preserving? If it is, why aren't the police routinely installing it?
If the reason is that due to coming into contact with lots of people would skew the results, then this would be manipulation of the data.
There is no good answer for this current position.
https://twitter.com/hadleybeeman/status/1309008721838772225?...
See especially this: https://twitter.com/hadleybeeman/status/1309013275745685511?...
And this: https://twitter.com/hadleybeeman/status/1309013508152078336?...
Please don't forget that there isn't a single UK-wide or England-wide police force. There are many small regional forces across England. Quite often they issue advice that's dumb. You'll see a police force's social media team retweeting a "scam alert" that's an obvious hoax.
So, we don't know why they've issued this advice and we don't know if they've based that on sensible factual information of some bit of misinformation.