Governments and private companies — from California and the U.K. to Apple and Google — race to create apps that track COVID-19 infections. As far as we know, they currently rely on voluntary reporting by people who test positive for the novel coronavirus.
Will you download the COVID-19 app — perhaps called iKaren — to save the world? Will you report your positive test, or change your behavior when you get a proximity alert?
Background Resources:
The Second Wave is Here. Have You Installed the COVID Alert App
[Joshua Gans, The Conversation, September 24, 2020]
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Bill Whittle Network · Download iKaren Now: Will You Use a COVID-19 App to Save the World?
21 replies on “Download iKaren Now: Will You Use a COVID-19 App to Save the World?”
In the British version iKaren reports if you have been in the same location (eg a store) as someone who is tagged as having the virus. Then you must self-isolate for 10 days or be fined. The kicker is that you don’t need to be in the store at the same time as the person with the virus. You can go into the store in the morning and if someone with the virus goes into the store in the afternoon you will get reported as having had a contact and must self-isolate.
Having just listened to Daniel DeFoe’s A Journal Of The Plague Year, Being A History Of The London Plague (1665), it’s clear what the likely progression of downloading an iKaren app will be: mandatory & complete isolation without appeal.
Many employers are making contact tracing software mandatory for staff because the employer is liable in court, common law not government law. These tools are useless medically at this stage but useful as a defense in a court room. They were useful very early but Singapore was the only country that got it working early.
I have to fill out a statement per shift stating the I don’t have symptoms [list] and have not been to the following places [list] where out brakes have occurred. For a staff member with ten shifts in the day that’s ten forms a day. It is 100% about avoiding law suits. The organization runs care facilities including nursing homes. One of the nursing homes was decimated by an out break that made national news and raised questions in parliament. The legal angle is huge and very real.
So I entered a supermarket yesterday, and a woman wearing safety glasses, face shield, mask and gloves was just coming out and suddenly stopped. She looked at me with terror in her eyes, and started backing away, as if I got any closer she would surely die. This crap has got to stop, I have encountered this hysteria on other occasions in errands around town, though thankfully not too often. If I hadn’t been wearing a mask, she probably would have called the police!
If she is immune compromised like my father, a transplant recipient, then her precautions are valid and real. Yet the clothing she’s wearing still only have a 80% chance of working. Her fear is valid.
She may be nursing home staff mandated to wear full PPE from dawn to dusk. If you want to protect people in nursing homes, etc then the nurses must wear this and self isolate to as part of the process and that includes going home from work and shopping. People who say just protect the elderly in the nursing homes fail to realize that that means level 2 PPE for all staff and deliveries.
The out fit you describe is what I am mandated to wear in my shift work with disabled adults. Its necessary, mandatory, and impossible all at the same time. If she was nursing home staff then contact with you could have forced her to take two weeks off work as part of the protective measures and there is a good chance that the nursing home is already short staffed. She has no one that can shop for her. Or the products are medical and time sensitive. This stuff is hard.
The China Flu is actually a cold. All colds are caused from a corona virus, and there are at least 150 of them. Influenza is a different virus.
RI has an app which tracks your every move, so that the Wise Ones can know who comes into contact with whom, in order to facilitate contact tracing, to help them contain the virus.
Earth to Wise Ones! You cannot contain this virus. That pony left the barn many, many moons ago. And I’m not getting any apps to facilitate Big Brother following me around. I’ve committed no crime, and I’m not out on parole.
If the United States should survive this current attempt to turn us into the New Soviet Union, this will go down as the biggest hoax perpetrated upon humanity in history. The virus is not a hoax. The virus is real, with serious consequences for a very select population. Everything else associated with it, is at this point complete bulls**t!
Just for the record… I signed on to the Israeli health ministry app “Hamagen” or The Shield”… I did it initially (end of March) just to see if I had been in the vicinity of anyone… and I wasn’t… no clue if it tracked me all the way in Canada but now that I am back… I guess I will be…
I already take serious steps to prevent my info from going anywhere I don’t want it to go. There’s not a chance in hell I’ll put an app like that on my phone. And if phone operating system developers make it part of the system, I’ll root my phone (jailbreak, for iPhone users) and install a third party OS that doesn’t have it.
When they start to pay users of the app then I might consider it.
These social apps are not difficult to compromise. The question one has to ask is why trust such a cloud service if one fears of to a virus that is demonstratesd to be far less deadly than the power-and money-hungry megalomaniacs have claimed — especially since said app is created by some of those megalomaniacs?
Let me answer the headline question before we get into this.
NO!
In fact, I recommend that you prepend the most nasty and obnoxious explicative of your choosing, and you may come close to my true meaning.
I was promised a zombie apocalypse. All I got was a 99.996% recovery rate.
Yeah! What happened? I had a barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat ready to go!
I have in addition to my gun(s), a war hammer and a two handed sword. My preferred weapon would be the war hammer.
Note to self: Buy war hammer….
Where do you get a Warhammer?
I think you download it onto your phone…
I also have a (real, not a wall hanging decoration) bearded ax and a real Italian two handed long sword, a purely wicked crossbow and an 85# longbow. Guns are noisy, which wouldn’t stop me from using one if that was the better application. Still, there’s a certain cachet to hacking (or bashing) the undead and braindead with edged weapons and cudgels. I understand your attitude completely.
I have some kind of staff that I don’t know the name of from when I acted in Renaissance faires years ago. It’s about 4 feet long and has a heavy head with a 4 inch tip like a thick ice pick at one end and a thickish metal sort of serrated tip on the other end. Whatever it is, it would hurt if you got hit with it.
Oh-Kay! I just had to do a search for War Hammer. Nice! Well balanced, fairly lightweight, nice sharp pointy end. Medieval technology. Can you imaging the swing velocity if we retrofitted them with a carbon fiber shaft? Unlike golf, a “slice” with a War Hammer would be a pretty good thing!