A lanyard vs a piece of paper
Staged debate, as a format, has problems for actual discussion. So I wasn’t expecting the Stuff for/against on the COVID card to be more informative than the various discussions I’ve seen on Twitter.
This, from Ian Taylor was more than I’d anticipated, though
The Government has budgeted $210m for the 2023 census. That’s $210m to get a piece of paper to every New Zealander.
If you were a nasty suspicious person you might think I’ve quoted this out of context, and cut out all the things apart from the mail-out that go into making the value of the census over a billion dollars (PDF) — developing a sampling frame for dwellings, the hardware and software computer systems, data entry and validation, monitoring of response rates, employing people to go door-to-door to catch up on non-response, the post-census enumeration survey, estimation of under-coverage, imputation of missing data, and so on.
You might think I’d left those out. But I didn’t. Describing the next Census as $210m to get a piece of paper to every New Zealander is like describing the COVID card as $100m to get a lanyard to every New Zealander. It leaves out all the stuff that makes it work.
And it’s not as if there aren’t other, more relevant, comparisons to make. A better comparison for the $100m cost of the COVID card would be the cost a of a few days more for Auckland at Level 3. If the COVID card could save us a week at level 3 in total, over the next couple of years, and there isn’t another solution that would be better or cheaper, then it easily makes sense.
I’m basically in favour of Bluetooth proximity measures as an adjunct to tracing in the current situation of mostly-successful elimination. I don’t think they come anywhere close to allowing us to relax the isolation/quarantine process, as some people had suggested earlier.
For the COVID card in particular I’d like to see some evidence about realistic fractions of people carrying the thing a year from now, and about how many false-positive ‘close contacts’ it generates. This information might exist, but it hasn’t been pushed by proponents. I’m not convinced by the opposing argument that it will take months to roll out: the optimistic estimates for mass vaccination are probably eighteen months away; we’ve got plenty of time to improve. I think there are questions about cost and reliability and acceptability of COVID card relative to other Bluetooth and non-Bluetooth options, but I’ll leave them to the engineers and designers (preferably people who won’t simply dismiss any reluctance to wear the thing as ‘fashion’).
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
The Covid card seems to be reinventing the wheel in that a large portion of the population has the low power Bluetooth proximity sensor in their phone. Im sure plenty of people have thought of that too, and would tie it into the existing covid scanner app.
4 years ago
Yes. The motivation is the substantial minority who don’t have the right phone hardware, with the argument being that the COVID card is a better workaround than trying to upgrade the country’s phones. And I don’t think the COVID card can be tied into the Apple/Google protocol, so mixing approaches may not be as easy as it looks
4 years ago