pointerWe chose not to build

Marc Andreessen:

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.

Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.

We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don’t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns. […] Why do we not have these things? Medical equipment and financial conduits involve no rocket science whatsoever. At least therapies and vaccines are hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard. We could have these things but we chose not to — specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to *build*.

pointerRobots welcome to take over, as pandemic accelerates automation

New York Times:

Labor and robotics experts say social-distancing directives, which are likely to continue in some form after the crisis subsides, could prompt more industries to accelerate their use of automation. And long-simmering worries about job losses or a broad unease about having machines control vital aspects of daily life could dissipate as society sees the benefits of restructuring workplaces in ways that minimize close human contact. […]

Recycling is one industry that may be altered permanently by the pandemic.

Another sign of the acceleration.

pointerApple and Google partner on COVID-19 contact tracing technology

Good news, Apple and Google are partnering to implement system-level APIs for a privacy friendly contact tracing done via bluetooth (which, as we were discussing the other day, seems the most sensible approach):

Apple and Google will work to enable a broader Bluetooth-based contact tracing platform by building this functionality into the underlying platforms. This is a more robust solution than an API and would allow more individuals to participate, if they choose to opt in, as well as enable interaction with a broader ecosystem of apps and government health authorities. Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders.

From a draft of the spec (up here):

The Contact Tracing Bluetooth Specification does not require the user’s location; any use of location is completely optional to the schema. In any case, the user must provide their explicit consent in order for their location to be optionally used.

Surveilling encounters

Here’s Carol Yin detailing how her movements have been tracked across China since the lockdown came into place. Upon entering a train station, she has been having to share her location data of recent weeks. When booking a taxi, she needs to scan a QR code generated by WeChat or Alipay to “check-in”. The same applies to taking public transport or accessing any building. The tracking is done via a combination of QR codes and location data from the phone providers.

The code China is assigning to each citizen — red, yellow or green — reflects someone’s contagion risk.

Israel is tapping into cellphone data, nothing fancy.

Taiwan set up an ‘electronic fence’: your phone determines whether you are respecting the boundaries of the quarantine or not. Authorities are alerted if you switch it off or as soon as you leave the designated space.

In reality China’s system is way more confusing and less centralised than you might have read. There are at least four competing health codes generated by different entities (city, province, community, and app codes). Each of them obliges to different rules. You might never find out why you were assigned that one.

South Korea is throwing in the mix a little bit of everything: CCTV surveillance, bank transaction logs, mobile phone usage. Big data! Hurray!

Here’s a website with data released by the Ministry of Health of Singapore. You can see every known infection case, down to every movement and every connection a case had. It’s alright because it’s anonymised. Sure.

Hong Kong is slapping wristbands upon arrival at its airports. The wristband connects to a smartphone app, StayAtHomeSafe. It generates a unique fingerprint of your house by looking into the signals emitted by the devices surrounding you — nearby WiFi, your WiFi, Bluetooth and cellular. “As you walk around the home, the algorithm on the app will sample the signals of the home.”

Palantir is doing well. “The software company is in discussions with authorities in France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.”

Singapore solution to contact tracing is an app called TraceTogether. The app creates a temporary ID by encrypting a user ID to a Ministry of Health owned public key and then broadcasts the temporary ID over Bluetooth. The Ministry of Health acts as a trusted third party (that can decrypt those IDs) and promises it will only use the information for COVID-19 related purposes.

—

You’d have noticed how (some) of these solutions are trying to do two things at once:

  • Help citizens with contact tracing
  • Help authorities surveilling whether the population is complying with the lockdown

Let’s neglect the latter (I hope we wouldn’t need or want to surveil). Here in the west we’ve got plenty of tools to self-diagnose our risk, yet we’re missing a widely adopted system to do contact tracing. If we want to go back to normality (where normality here simply stands for: going outside the house) it sounds likely that we’ll need a form of digital surveillance. Emphasis on likely: I am not in a position to weigh in on the efficacy of contact tracing — I know nothing — all I can say is that it seems to be a valuable tool if paired with other non-technical solutions.

That said, I worry that we’re going to do what we usually do when in panic mode: introduce purportedly temporary surveillance that ends up staying. We might adopt despotic tech, willingly, because it makes us feel safe without having evidence of any actual benefit. As before, we need to balance our need for security with some level of freedom.

It seems that we need:

  • A privacy-preserving system to track encounters. Using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to detect nearby devices (= humans) seems to make the most sense to me. There are doubts whether location tracking — done via GPS or phone carriers — can offer a meaningful contribution in defeating the virus. We’re talking about maintaining a 2-meter distance here: GPS accuracy is around 5 meters. We don’t need to know the coordinates, but rather the proximity with other devices. Proximity tracking seems to matter more.
  • If location is important (e.g. we want to notify everyone who has recently been in a listed hotspot, being it the tube, a public park, or else) guess what: retailers have been surveilling you for a while. You could use beacons in public spaces and WiFi signals to let each smartphone log access locally. The smartphone could then check its recorded path against a hotspot database. No information needs to leave the device (this is MIT’s PrivateKit)
  • We probably don’t want to share our location data with third parties unless we become infected. We want to collect it locally until it makes sense to share (part of) it. Existing health apps (in the UK: the NHS app, or third parties that work with them such as Babylon) could gain access to this data in a similar fashion as they request access to the health database
  • A system to alert every user that came into close range with a case for an extended period

Governments and health authorities should explain in details what data they’re using and for what reason. Most governments’ apps are asking for name, sex, birth year, residence, travel history and a plethora of other unnecessary information. If this system ends up determining one’s ability to roam freely, you’ll want to know why you can’t leave the house.

Ideally, we wouldn’t get an app. This should be something baked into the OS. Google and Apple should provide privacy settings for contact tracing: that would give us a universal system to collect this kind of data locally and securely. Besides, the utility of such system is null without everyone using it. A pandemic is global: there needs to be a global way of dealing with it.

It is possible to build a system for contact tracing that is also privacy-preserving. Apple does something similar, albeit for other purposes. And there’s already a proposed protocol, the PEPP-PT:

  • Assign a unique and anonymous ID to every device
  • When two devices come in close contact for an extended period of time, exchange and log the IDs
  • When someone is diagnosed with the virus, alert all the logged IDs
  • Then and only then: ask the affected IDs, via an app, to self-diagnose themselves continuously, and if they report symptoms get them tested (ideally even if not)

You’ll notice that there is no leak of data to the government under this scenario. All the government knows is that an ID needs to be tested.

Especially if the problem is here to stay for a while, we need a solution that doesn’t permanently compromise our freedom. We also need something that all of us can use and trust, independently of the country we inhabit.

A lot of the tools above — like tracking GPS movements — seem unnecessary. Let’s not scramble up a solution by throwing random data into the mix. An app is not going to save us. All of this is going to be pointless if the more essential pieces of the puzzle (like testing) are not there.

Alas, don’t demand surveillance, because no one is going to turn it off when this is over.

pointerGoogle’s mobility reports

A view on how we’re moving these days, based on aggregated data from Google Maps.

pointerLittle to do with hoarding

We can stop blaming the shortages on the rest of us. It’s a supply chain problem:

If you’re looking for where all the toilet paper went, forget about people’s attics or hall closets. Think instead of all the toilet paper that normally goes to the commercial market — those office buildings, college campuses, Starbucks, and airports that are now either mostly empty or closed. That’s the toilet paper that’s suddenly going unused. […]

In theory, some of the mills that make commercial toilet paper could try to redirect some of that supply to the consumer market. People desperate for toilet paper probably wouldn’t turn up their noses at it. But the industry can’t just flip a switch. Shifting to retail channels would require new relationships and contracts between suppliers, distributors, and stores; different formats for packaging and shipping; new trucking routes — all for a bulky product with lean profit margins.

Similarly, to reroute their suppliers to consumers some restaurants are turning into temporary grocery stores.

pointerThe robots are ready

Brookings Institution:

As virus-related recession fears escalate, it is important to stress that while automation is likely to surge in general, not everyone is equally vulnerable. As our 2019 assessment of automation trends suggests, it is low-income workers, the young, and workers of color who will be vulnerable if this pandemic shoves the nation into a recession. The automation surge is likely to affect the most “routine” occupations—jobs in areas such as production, food service, and transportation, for example.

Altogether, our research flags some 36 million jobs that have a “high” susceptibility to automation.

As we were saying the other day.

Expect regulatory barriers to automation to be lifted

Reuters:

Fresh fruit and vegetables will become increasingly scarce in Europe, suppliers warn, as the coronavirus pandemic hampers the global movement of produce and of the people needed to gather crops.

BBC:

Due to ever growing travel restrictions aimed at limiting the spread of the coronavirus, we are now facing a shortfall of almost 80% of the workers required in Scotland to pick our crops this season.

Forbes

While many companies have no trouble hiring truck drivers for shorter distance gigs at a few hours at a time, employers have long been struggling to find drivers who can be away for days or even weeks. “Trucking companies are finding it much harder to recruit those long haul drivers,” he explains.

A prediction: regulatory barriers to automation will fall. In the short term we are seeing supermarkets and delivery services going on an hiring spree, but in parallel I’d expect a stronger push to replace humans with machines where this can be done but has insofar been hindered by regulation. Higher contagion risk, current and future, will encourage more businesses to automate more jobs. Continuity of the service — being able to function even when your workforce falls ill — will be another factor.

We would have (one) less problem if trucks did not require drivers, if fruit picking was handled by robots (hard to do, still), if supermarkets could stay open 24/7h with self-checkouts (easy), if the last mile delivery was handled by a drone or machine of some sort, and so on.

On some of these things we’re not there yet, but some sectors have been held back (protected) by regulation: I’d expect that to go away quite soon.

pointerHow will we know when we’re through this?

Larry Brillant, an epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox:

The world is not going to begin to look normal until three things have happened. One, we figure out whether the distribution of this virus looks like an iceberg, which is one-seventh above the water, or a pyramid, where we see everything. If we’re only seeing right now one-seventh of the actual disease because we’re not testing enough, and we’re just blind to it, then we’re in a world of hurt. Two, we have a treatment that works, a vaccine or antiviral. And three, maybe most important, we begin to see large numbers of people—in particular nurses, home health care providers, doctors, policemen, firemen, and teachers who have had the disease—are immune, and we have tested them to know that they are not infectious any longer. And we have a system that identifies them, either a concert wristband or a card with their photograph and some kind of a stamp on it. Then we can be comfortable sending our children back to school, because we know the teacher is not infectious.

My premeditatio malorum is that we might not get out of this before the end of the year:

The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package — or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission — will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more) — given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed. We show that intermittent social distancing — triggered by trends in disease surveillance — may allow interventions to be relaxed temporarily in relative short time windows, but measures will need to be reintroduced if or when case numbers rebound.

In the positive scenario, I expect two to three months.

pointerNormal is not an option

Arnold King:

In the long run, I don’t expect normal either. Pre-crisis, our patterns of specialization and trade were optimized for efficiency at the expense of fragility. Expect supply chains in the future to have a lot more redundancy and to be less driven by cost minimization. The Chief Risk Officer’s approval will now be needed before the CEO will approve a major new supply contract.

We will develop a lot of what you might call social-distancing capital, including the ability to make use of remote meetings and distance learning. Last night, some folks attempted a virtual session of dancing. Most of the time was spent getting a bunch of old people up to speed on using Zoom. Next time, we might be able to dance. People will get accustomed to new forms of entertaintment.

The guy in this video is flicking through the obituary pages of the local newspaper. The first paper is from the 9th of February: one page and a bit. The second paper is from the 13th of march, yesterday: 10 pages.

I also would like to point out that Lombardy, the region most severely affected by this, has a 9.9/10 score in health on the OECD scale: across all OECD regions, the region is in the top 5% in health.

Don’t be stupid.

pointerHow much worse it could get, in charts

NY Times:

The point of a model like this is not to try to predict the future but to help people understand why we may need to change our behaviors or restrict our movements, and also to give people a sense of the sort of effect these changes can have. […]

None of us know what lies ahead. But the wise uncertainty of epidemiologists is preferable to the confident bluster of television blowhards. The one thing we can be confident of is that enormous risks lie ahead — including a huge loss of life — if we don’t take aggressive action.

The possibility for the UK to reach herd immunity (a marketing slang for natural selection at this point, lacking of clear measures to protect the elderly or to strengthen the health system) is based on a lot of untested assumptions.

At the end: “I think one thing that people should remember is that nature is the biggest bio-terrorist. Nature wants to kill you.”

Bill Gates, back in 2015:

But in fact, we can build a really good response system. We have the benefits of all the science and technology that we talk about here. We’ve got cell phones to get information from the public and get information out to them. We have satellite maps where we can see where people are and where they’re moving. We have advances in biology that should dramatically change the turnaround time to look at a pathogen and be able to make drugs and vaccines that fit for that pathogen. So we can have tools, but those tools need to be put into an overall global health system. And we need preparedness.

The best lessons, I think, on how to get prepared are again, what we do for war. For soldiers, we have full-time, waiting to go. We have reserves that can scale us up to large numbers. NATO has a mobile unit that can deploy very rapidly. NATO does a lot of war games to check, are people well trained? Do they understand about fuel and logistics and the same radio frequencies? So they are absolutely ready to go. So those are the kinds of things we need to deal with an epidemic.

pointerApple to close all Apple Stores outside China

Tim Cook:

The global spread of COVID-19 is affecting every one of us. At Apple, we are people first, and we do what we do with the belief that technology can change lives and the hope that it can be a valuable tool in a moment like this. Teachers are innovating to make remote lessons come alive. Companies are experimenting with new ways to stay productive. And medical experts can diagnose illnesses and reach millions with critical updates in the blink of an eye. We are all adapting and responding in our own way, and Apple wants to continue to play a role in helping individuals and communities emerge stronger.

But this global effort — to protect the most vulnerable, to study this virus, and to care for the sick — requires all of our care, and all of our participation. And I want to update you about the ways in which we are doing our part.

The right call to make. If the government is refusing to act fast in face of evidence (as is the case here in the UK), we need to take responsibility in our hands.

If you are organising something, postpone it. If you run a company and can WFH, enforce it.

The virus is not the main danger, our unprepared medical system and fragile supply chains are. We know and have been told about what works and what doesn’t: there is no excuse at this point to delay action.

The only reason to panic is if everyone is going about as if nothing was happening.