What A Day - Contact Tracing: There's An App For That

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

Contact tracing apps have been adopted in countries around the world to track the spread of COVID-19, but they’re not being used as much in the US. American tech companies are working to get these apps up-and-running… despite some privacy concerns. Cybersecurity reporter Patrick Howell O'Neill joins the show to update us on how these apps are working worldwide.Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Fed Chair Jerome Powell took questions from the Senate yesterday on how we’ll get out of the current economic crisis. They offered up starkly different opinions on how the US can avoid permanent economic damage. And in headlines: major corporations cut ‘hazard pay’ for essential workers, Qatar Airlines takes a pumped-up approach to PPE, and the data scientist who made Florida’s COVID-19 dashboard gets axed for refusing to fudge data.

it's wednesday may 20th i'm akilah hughes and i'm gideon resnick and this is what a day where we're doing our own indoor summer vacation just by cranking the heat up real high yeah i feel like if i sweat enough then it means it's officially summer yeah if i am a damp disgusting pool on the floor buddy it's time for summer. Oh, God. On today's show, other countries and a few states are using cell phones to track the spread of COVID-19. We check in on how that's going and then some headlines. But first, the latest.

Graduates. We check in on how that's going and then some headlines. But first, the latest. Graduates, adults don't tell you this, but once or twice a week in real world life, someone's going to ask you to climb a giant rope. No reason. Just climb the rope. Sure, every now and then the rope is a metaphor, but honestly, most of the time, it's just a big rope and you have to climb it. If you don't get that joke, talk to your mom and dad back in the day when we were a lot fitter than you people are. There's a lot to unpack here, mostly that he's, you know, insulting the graduating class. But that was Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse giving

just a truly bizarre, menacing virtual graduation speech over the weekend. One of the most unnerving pieces of content to come out of the pandemic for sure. But in news, the World Health Organization wrapped up their global meeting yesterday with a promise to conduct an impartial, independent review of their response to the coronavirus pandemic, even as they continue to fight it. Aside from President Trump, who is continuing to threaten the organization by pulling all U.S. funding, other countries around the world mostly decided now is not a good time to hobble the WHO. In the United States, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Fed Chair Jerome Powell took questions from the Senate about the economic crisis and how to get out of it. While they both agreed the economy is suffering, they differed pretty

starkly on how to avoid permanent damage. Powell said a more forceful policy response is needed. Looking at you, Congress. Whereas Mnuchin said it's all about reopening, to which Senator Sherrod Brown asked this. How many workers should give their lives to increase our GDP by half a percent? That you're pushing people back into the workplace. There's been no national program to provide worker safety. The president says reopen slaughterhouses. Nothing about slowing the line down.

Nothing about getting protective equipment is is is how many workers should give their lives to increase the GDP or the Dow Jones by a thousand points? You know, workers should give their lives to do that, Mr. Senator. And I think your characterization is unfair. Hmm. God damn. Okay, that is, I mean, geez, you know, they should just resign after something like that. You can't come back from that. All right, well, let's talk about reopening. Like everything else in this pandemic, federal guidance has been scant, and rules about how to do this safely are uneven throughout the country. Gideon, give us a sense of where things stand. Yeah, so as we approach Memorial Day weekend, all 50 states will have begun to reopen at least partially. And as you mentioned, this looks very different depending on where exactly you live. But when it comes to reopening, public

health officials want a few things in order. One, the ability to effectively test people to identify those known cases. Two, the ability to trace the contacts of those known cases when they find them. Three, then the ability to isolate those individuals that are diagnosed with COVID-19 in order to stop the spread of the virus further. Now, other countries have been able to reopen after having one or more of those elements more firmly in place than the United States. Right. So there's been a lot of coverage of testing, but less about contact tracing, which is basically

when someone from the public health department tracks down people with an infectious disease, in this case, COVID-19, then helps them quarantine, asks who they were in contact with, gets in touch with those people, etc. It's something that you and I have been really interested in. And so we're going to take some time today to delve into it. Yeah. And in particular, there's this conversation now around using our cell phones to help with that process. Countries like China, South Korea, India, France, and Germany all have their own COVID-19 smartphone apps. These apps haven't been broadly used yet in the United States, but Apple and Google are working on technology to make this easier to do on their devices so that health authorities in the U.S. could create apps to run on our phones and use that data. So we're still waiting for Apple and Google to release this,

but they've said it'll operate via Bluetooth, and it won't collect location data that's due to privacy concerns therein. Now, civil liberty advocates in the U.S. have already expressed concerns about new technologies being integrated into workplaces, like fever scanning cameras and temperature sensing guns, as being both intrusive and also unreliable. And tracking apps could potentially just compound those very concerns. The other challenge in the U.S. is usage, since any app would likely be voluntary. So far, Utah and the Dakotas are using voluntary phone apps, and South Dakota has seen

the most success success with reportedly just 2% of residents using it. Widespread adoption has similarly been an issue in other countries. To get a better sense of all of this, I spoke to Patrick Howell O'Neill. He's a cybersecurity reporter for MIT Technology Review. He's working on a project with his colleagues tracking automated contact tracing efforts around the globe. We talked yesterday about how this is playing out so far and what we can all expect next. So contact tracing apps are actually kind of new, but contact tracing itself is a tried and true method of fighting disease outbreaks that's been used for Ebola, for smallpox, etc. And what it is, is basically, you know, medical professionals trying to track the outbreak of a disease and contact events and then establishing quarantine to stop the outbreak of that disease. And so it's usually a very human effort.

So there are people either calling in mass to anyone who's suffered an infection or had a contact event or going out and seeing people in person. What's different about this is that there are apps and other kinds of technology being built here that is meant to kind of complement that human effort. It's meant to scale it. It's meant to, you could say, fact check it because people's memories are faulty. And the idea is, and this is being kind of idealistic, we'll get into the nuance of what it can and cannot do, but the ideal is that anyone with a smartphone is able to know almost automatically when they've come into contact and have been at risk of contracting COVID-19. The Google Apple effort is an effort to build into the Android and iOS operating systems the technology that which some haven't been privacy friendly, for instance, or some just run into stumbling blocks because they're not built into the operating system layer.

And so, for instance, if you have an app on iOS and it's not always at the front, then sometimes it stops working, which is not just annoying, but potentially dangerous in a situation like this, whereas Apple can just kind of fix that themselves. So they're building something in the operating system that we'll see it's not out yet, but has the potential to really solve some of these fundamental issues. And I've seen that they've both said that their systems won't share location data, citing privacy concerns. Some local public health authorities say that could limit their ability to actually use a phone app to do proper contact tracing. First of all, is that the correct understanding of all of this? And to what extent do you think this will get in the way

of apps or this technology being used in the United States? It is true that Apple and Google are, as of this time, not allowing the apps that use their technology to track location. Now, the big question is, does that undercut the efficacy? Does that make these apps, you know, not as effective in tracking the disease? The answer is kind of, we don't know. There's a lot going into this. First of all, you know, these apps that are tracking location, whether they're using GPS or cell tower triangulation or Wi-Fi location tracking, there's a lot of problems with all of those things. Like GPS, guess what? If the weather

is bad, your GPS location is not that good. Cell phone triangulation, not that precise. So there's like a bunch of variables with all these things. And there's a bunch of variables with Bluetooth technology, which is what Google and Apple are using. So the point is that it's not really as clear cut. And again, like I said before, contact tracing is tried and true. Contact tracing apps, new, not tried and true. We don't know what is really needed. We don't have a roadmap. And the other dimension here that has to be mentioned is that when it comes to location tracking, you add a huge privacy angle here that has to be, you know, it's not definitive. You every nation can come down where they need to on that. But it has to be discussed when you talk about location tracking in mass. Yeah. And we're getting we're kind of driving at this point that I was interested in that this has been used to some degree in other countries so far that are dealing with a pandemic.

You're talking about issues of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, effectiveness. What are some of the other issues that have popped up so far in the other countries' early implementation of this? Well, I would say maybe the fundamental issue is, will people even download these things? There are countries, so in India, the app is effectively mandatory for several million people. So for instance, if you're a government employee, or if you're a gig worker, or if you want to use trains, or some cities have made it effectively mandatory. But that means also there are millions of people for whom it's still voluntary. And that becomes down to, you know,

does the citizenry trust the people who are building these tools? Is there strong governance? Is there strong transparency? You can imagine that's a very different question or at least a very different answer when you're talking about the U.S. versus various countries in Europe versus Asia, you know, various countries in Asia.

So that's like the big issue or one of the big issues so far. Right. And to go back quickly to the privacy concern element, is the primary fear that it's kind of an unknown for a lot of people, is it the notion that the information could be shared with other parties that the user is not authorizing? Is it the sharing of personal health information or some kind of combination of all those three that make people nervous about the privacy element here? So I think that this is a global issue, and so there's kind of a huge global scale of answers to this question. I also wanted to take a second because I've gotten a lot of tweets and a lot of feedback about the fact that since me and my colleagues wrote this story, we must be kind of privacy hawks telling people not to download these apps because, you know, you got to protect your privacy at all costs, which is not at all what we're trying to do.

And maybe it's our fault for not communicating that well enough. What we're trying to do is arm people with facts so that they can make decisions on their own. That's it. Moving on though, as far as what is making people worried. So if you're in China, if you're in India, if you're in the US,

those answers might be somewhat different, but there's some commonalities. So in China, there you're in India, if you're in the US, those answers might be somewhat different, but there's some commonalities. Um, so in China, there's virtually no transparency about the technology that's been used here, which is par for the course. Um, but we're pretty sure, uh, based on reporting from the New York times that the information goes directly to the police. Um, in Turkey, their app, uh, has more transparency. They tell you the information goes to the police now so there's questions about whether or not like when you have this let's say location data when you're tracking someone for 30 days 60 days whatever it may be depending on the app is this just the health the local health department tracking it our police tracking it our

intelligence agencies tracking it it's very different depending on each country. And even, you know, even within countries, there are multiple technological efforts here. You know, there are apps, but there are, which is what we're tracking, but there are surveillance systems beyond apps also that are in use here. And so, yeah, I think if we're going to speak, you know, just broadly necessarily because it's global, but I think people are worried that this is the kind of event, a September 11th kind of event where we take steps to remove privacy and privacy rights that eventually leads to some permanent loss of privacy, either on a local, country, or global scale. That was Patrick Howell O'Neill from MIT Technology Review.

Definitely check out his work on this and more. He pointed out that in the U.S., these apps will probably be run by local health departments rather than the federal government. So we'll be following this to see how it all moves forward. But that is just the latest for you. And if not, I hope your imagination is really good. We're checking in and this time it's about an obscene amount of money spent on something stinky. Michael Jordan's game worn Nikes from 1985 sold for a reported $560,000. This in the midst of a pandemic and a major economic downturn. So giddy. Two questions. One, what do you think they smell like? And two, what's the max amount you'd pay for something someone else sweated in?

I mean, at this point, they probably are approximating a normal smell, right? Like we're talking about, we're talking about, what is this? 40? 35 years. Okay, I'm not going to math. 35 years old. So they probably just smell like old shoes. So I don't think that would be my huge issue here.

But the principle of it is wrong to me and the amount that I would be able to spend. So my maximum amount of something someone else sweated in, five bucks, ten bucks. And who would be the person who had to have sweated in it for you to pay that? I think that it would have to be... I think that it would have to be at an event that I felt a part of. Okay. And so I was memorializing the event and not the stinky item that I had purchased. Yeah, that's true. The stinky item's before our time, it turns out, so.

Yeah, I can't feel attached to it, yeah. But okay, so you're looking at the full option of MJ's shoes. What are you buying? What's the high amount that you would pay for them? Okay, so I guess, like, here's how I feel. So it wouldn't be those shoes, like you said. It'd have to be something that I have an attachment to. And so it would have to be the shoes that Michael wore in the game against the Monstars on Space Jam.

Yeah, that's cooler. Because that had a big impact on me. And, you know, I would empty my bank account for that. I am happy to live in those shoes to, you know, hopefully dance to busk in those shoes so I could eat. But God, I mean, really just absolutely worth risking it all for those Space Jam shoes, the special stuff that saved humanity and Michael Jordan. Yeah, I mean, look, if there is ever a time when Monstars would appear on this Earth, given everything else that we've seen right now, it's probably this moment.

So you're just being prepared in this case. That's exactly right. And I'm hoping that, you know, maybe they'll see me in them. They'll be like, she's a real threat. Let's just skip her house and it will have been worth it. Yeah, they'll get everybody else.

But I think that's a smart move. There you go. Well, we did it. We checked our temperatures. They're very chill. And hey, now we know exactly what our standard for smelly old shoe buying is. And we'll be back to check in with you all tomorrow. Let's wrap up with some headlines.

Headlines. mail in their ballots without risking their health by in-person voting. What a concept. Michigan is the latest state to encourage the option to vote by mail due to the pandemic. And this move might worry some Republicans, including President Trump, who have been trying to limit absentee voting, especially in states like Michigan, where he won in 2016 by a very narrow margin. Turnout is also expected to be higher with the absentee option available. That's what's up. All right. Amazon, Kroger, and Rite Aid are among some of the country's biggest retailers

that are suspending the extra hazard pay they gave their essential workers. Rite Aid ended its $2 an hour bonus pay last week, while Amazon and Kroger plan to end their bonuses later this month. Many unions are pushing back, saying that employees will still be facing higher risks at work than usual. They argue that if workers are asked to still wear PPE and social distance at their jobs, they are, in fact, still at risk. I think that makes sense.

Amazon did give some warehouse workers free branded T-shirts that say, thanks to you on them to soften the blow. Which is funny because in all the photos of strikes that have been published during the pandemic, one of the few signs that I haven't seen is more bad merch. When do we want it? Now. All right. Bleak. The scientist who created Florida's COVID-19 dashboard says she was fired for refusing to manipulate data to paint a rosier picture of the virus in order to support plans to reopen. Rebecca Jones was asked to hide data that showed Floridians who reported

symptoms of COVID-19 before their cases were officially announced. In addition, users of the state's dashboard reported that over the last few weeks, some data seemed to disappear or become difficult to access. As an employee of Florida's Department of Health, Jones worked 16-hour days until May 5th to deliver the dashboard. Her commitment to transparency was apparently too much for Florida officials like Governor Ron DeSantis, who you might remember made the trailblazing decision to label wrestling an essential business back in mid-April. In most places, potentially life-saving public health data is just as essential as the opportunity to watch large men grab on each other, but it's not Mr. DeSantis' Florida. Oh, goodness. All right. Well, if you get sick in Florida, you know who to sue. All right. Well,

Cutter Airways announced that in addition to the traditional face mask and gloves, they'll be outfitting flight attendants with goggles and hazmat suits on all upcoming flights. When Howie Mandel wore a hazmat suit and a gas mask back in March, we laughed. Now, Howie Mandel is basically the air travel czar of Qatar. Qatar Airways will also require passengers to wear masks starting May 25th. That'll give them some defense against airborne transmission, but not as much as the flight attendants who will be safe from everything from coronavirus to stray paintballs to Nickelodeon style sliming. AirAsia and Philippine Airlines both rolled out their own special PPE suits for flight attendance last month,

but they were mostly limited to special repatriation flights that helped nationals get home. For me, I won't feel truly comfortable until airlines give the bubble boy treatment to everyone riding on the plane. Let's roll into each other at high speeds at 30,000 feet. Let's do it! And those are the plane. Let's roll into each other at high speeds at 30,000 feet. Let's do it. And those are the headlines. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, buy our sneakers for a half a million dollars and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just pretty names on scented candles like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And please don't slime us

on an airplane. That's not what it's for. Be decent to yourself and the other passengers. What A Day is a product of Crooked Media Media It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis Sonia Tun is our assistant producer Our head writer is John Milstein and our senior producer is Katie Long Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kshaka