On why CovidCard trumps a tracing app
Sam Morgan tells Chris Keall why his group’s CovidCard plan can do what smartphone apps can’t
Lots of people have had a swing at Sam Morgan’s CovidCard. Below, the entrepreneur deals with their objections, blow by blow. But first, a quick recap of where our Government’s tracing effort is at now, in technology terms.
The Government’s NZ Covid Tracer app is, so far, a bust. Only 590,000 people or 11.7 per cent of the population have downloaded it, and a bare 0.2 per cent are using it to scan posters.
Of course, we’re now in the relative calm of level 1, but even in the throes of level 4 usage was minimal — as it has been overseas, even in compliant Singapore.
In its initial version, the NZ Covid Tracer app is quite limited. You can download it to your Apple or Android phone, then use it to create a “digital diary” of places you’ve been by scanning QR code posters as you enter various supermarkets, restaurants and other premises (as long as they’ve got MBIE’s official QR code posters up — one of a number of points of confusion).
There’s no way to automatically share your location history with health authorities if you become infected (although you can open your profile on your phone when a government tracing agent calls, and talk them through it).
And unlike apps in Singapore and Australia, there’s no feature to use your smartphone’s Bluetooth wireless to record your proximity to others.
The CovidCard alternative
Enter Trade Me founder Sam Morgan, the public front for a group which includes Navman founder Sir Peter Maire, which says it has developed and tested a practical, workable alternative: a “CovidCard” — the size of your office swipe card and about three times as thick, worn around your neck on a lanyard (a pocket or purse would hinder transmission).
Morgan says that for $100 million, we could all be issued with a CovidCard within five months.
Ethnic bias
The entrepreneur says a smartphone approach disadvantages some people. “There is no consideration of equity. The poor, Ma¯ori, Pasifika and migrant communities,” he says, “Do you really think these communities will use an app? The Government only got 65 per cent of Ma¯ori and Pasifika people to do the Census. The next outbreak will arise in these communities, in all likelihood.” Morgan doesn’t see tracing apps ever coming up to snuff. And he sees the Government’s human tracing staff being overwhelmed by an outbreak of community transmission.
His CovidCard does feature Bluetooth. It detects and records close contacts using the wireless technology and stores this data securely on a person’s card for 21 days.
No contact data is automatically stored in the cloud or elsewhere and it does not track user location as the card does not have GPS capability.
If you do become infected, then a health professional will download the data from your CovidCard, and its Bluetooth-powered record of the other Covid Card users you’ve been close to for an extended time.
‘A $100m experiment’
Paperkite CEO Antony Dixon, whose company’s Rippl tracing app now has
70,000-plus downloads, says “I wouldn’t spend $100m on an experiment.” He would like to see a “closed-loop trial” first. Longer term, he sees any CovidCard as best-suited for use where people are gathered in high concentration. At a concert with
30,000 people, for example, each could be issued with a card.
Morgan says you would need high adoption to get a good handle on whom those 30,000 people at Dixon’s concert came into contact with once they were back out in the world.
“On percentages, the function is quadratic. If you double users, you multiply reach by four. Twenty per cent usage gives you just 4 per cent of contacts traced. Forty per cent gives you 16 per cent. Eighty per cent usage gives you 64 per cent of contacts,” the CovidCard advocate says.
“This is the fundamental problem facing any peer-to-peer contact tracing solution — you need to get very high levels of adoption,” he adds.
And as for the $100m price tag? That’s only two days’ spending in NZ health budget terms, he says. Overall, the Government is spending some $50 billion on its coronavirus response. And the CovidCard could prevent NZ from having to return to level 4 lockdown, with all its costs.
Will they wear it?
As Morgan conceded above, a CovidCard (like an app) would need a high level of adoption — around 80 per cent — to be effective.
“Even under the conditions of community transmission and increased community angst, you would likely need strong encouragement to wear it in places of risk,” Morgan says.
“Whether this stretches to mandating in, say, pubs, is a policy decision above my paygrade.”
Unlike an app on a phone, it’s immediately obvious if someone is wearing a card on a lanyard, making it easy to police.
Victoria University School of Engineering and Computer Science senior lecturer Dr Simon McCallum doubts that compulsory use of a CovidCard (or any tracing measure) would be possible. “Some communities just don’t trust the Government”. He sees dairies being open to cash-only sales, and black markets developing.
Privacy Commissioner John Edwards hasn’t taken a pro or anti position on Morgan and Co’s project, but right now he says: “their business case raises many more questions than it answers”.
“What happens when people lose their card? Are they condemned to social and commercial exclusion until a replacement can be issued? Or will they borrow someone else’s? Will a black market in counterfeit CovidCards develop for those who don’t wish to or can’t use the real thing?”
Many New Zealanders would be uncomfortable having to carry a mandated piece of hardware that records all their contacts for the Government, Edwards says.
“And what happens when you’ve left your card in your other jacket when you go to the supermarket or restaurant? Will cash-strapped small businesses really exclude paying customers when there is no evidence of community spread of the disease, just because they do not have their CovidCard?”
We’ve already been compelled
“Clearly it is not desirable to have government tell you what to do,” Morgan says.
But, he says, “they make all of us carry a driver’s licence.
“They made us all stay inside for six weeks.”
He points out that in Victoria, wearing a mask in public is now mandatory.
And as for lost cards? “Presently, as a society, we manage with edge cases such as when you forget your driver’s licence or the glasses you need to drive, if you forget your wallet when you go to the restaurant, you forget your bike helmet when riding your bike, you lose your credit card, forget you age ID when buying booze, etc.
“These don’t appear to be insurmountable issues and formal and informal conventions will arise around these cases. We don’t need 100 per cent usage 100 per cent of the time for it to achieve the aims.
“You need to deal with [lost cards] by making it easy to get a replacement — from a Post Office or over the counter at a bank or at The Warehouse. ”
Catching a sneeze
McCallum agrees with Morgan & Co’s estimate that a CovidCard and its first year of operation could be delivered for $100m.
And he acknowledges that it would help to have a single device, using a single Bluetooth standard, with Bluetooth always on.
McCallum says he sees an “ecosystem” of different tracking solutions. And while he acknowledges a CovidCard would deliver always-on, consistent signalstrength Bluetooth, he says there could still be false positives (person A stands next to person B, but with a screen in the way) or missed contacts (person A sneezes, then person B arrives a few minutes later and walks into their molecules after person A and their CovidCard are long gone).
McCallum says there’s research suggesting Covid-19 could be airborne, in certain conditions, for up to seven or eight minutes. “But it’s so new, we really don’t know.” Evidence for airborne Covid-19 is mounting, according to a recent roundup in the science journal Nature.
Hardware can’t be updated
Edwards says there are also considerable logistical obstacles in ensuring every adult gets a card.
“We do not have a population register in New Zealand . . . even IRD struggles to maintain up-to-date address details,” he says.
While smartphone apps can be updated and improved, a CovidCard could not be once it was issued.
“We would be stuck with it for a year with no ability to adapt or change or learn from the experience of other countries, or of how the card operates in New Zealand,” he says.
But software solutions to assist with contact tracing can be improved, Edwards says.
Morgan concedes that a CovidCard would have baked-in technology for a year, but says a lot of the numbercrunching would happen on servers after data was downloaded from cards. So algorithms could be changed on the server side if, say, it was decided that data about contacts within 1m for five minutes should be analysed.
And in his mind, smartphone tracing apps’ ability to be upgraded is moot, since so few people install them and they just don’t work.
Joint approach
Apple and Google’s joint effort to create a Covid-tracing solution is an interesting one. It works under the bonnet — eliminating the troublesome need to keep an app up in the foreground all the time — and it uses mapping and tracking technology that already exists on every smartphone to talk to tracking apps.
While it’s technically easy to have Apple Maps and Google Maps track your every step, and interaction, it’s also something that will give some people the heebeejeebees.
McCallum isn’t one of them. The Victoria academic says he’ll happily share his location data with Apple and Google if it keeps him safe from Covid.
In fact, in everyday life he’s happy to trade his privacy for the convenience that comes from smartphone location tools. The prospective Labour Party candidate even shares his location in real time with his partner via his smartphone (reducing the odds of an Iain LeesGalloway scenario).
And at one point he shared his location in real time with his students.
McCallum admits most people are not so open, but adds that around 80 per cent of us overshare on Facebook.
The CovidCard would be good at safeguarding anonymity, but “it’s a lot of work and lot of money to solve a small problem”.
Morgan says the CovidCard will keep data private. The GCSB and Ministry of Defence were looped into its security planning.
But he says he was not driven primarily by whether a hardware or software solution had the best privacy. Rather, he landed on the CovidCard after researching both, and concluding that software apps simply didn’t get results.
Privacy Act not enough
While the Privacy Act says data must be stored securely, and used only for the purpose for which it was collected, Council for Civil Liberties chair Thomas Beagle says the act has very significant carve-outs allowing release of data “to avoid prejudice to the maintenance of the law by any public sector agency, including prejudice to the prevention, detection, investigation, prosecution, and punishment of offences” or for “for the protection of public revenue”.
Beagle says there would need to be legislation for a CovidCard, stating that police, security agencies and IRD could not access the data. Morgan says: fair cop — he agrees. Beagle, who works in healthcare software for his day job, says he is sceptical about claims made for tracing tools. He’s not sure the CovidCard could get enough voluntary adoption to be effective and, if not, where that would lead.
“Any form of compulsion [to wear a CovidCard] would have to be carefully considered,” he says.
Nelson Hospital trial
“This isn’t just a press release. Hundreds of pages of technical documentation have been shared with the Government.” The solution works, Morgan says.
There was also a 50-person trial at Nelson Hospital that saw Bluetooth CovidCards compared to the performance of cards using ultrawideband wireless.
“The purpose of the device is to capture clinically defined close contacts — 15 minutes of contact within a couple of metres. Achieving that is exactly what the purpose of our trials was seeking to test and we got very high confidence that in normal social settings with people moving around, etc, that it can do that to 90 per cent-plus confidence with around 10 per cent false positives.”
Morgan says he can’t compare that to data from Bluetooth tracing apps on smartphones, because none have been done, but that preliminary testing indicates it is dire. He points out that Singapore’s Government, which released the first Bluetooth smartphone app, TraceTogether, has now shifted its efforts to a Bluetooth dongle, worn around the neck.
Where to from here?
Is he seeing government support?
Morgan says there was “a lot of enthusiasm during level 4” for the CovidCard, but that it has fallen away in level 1.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has made determinedly neutral comments throughout. Recently, she said the card’s technical merits were still being assessed, and that it was one of a number of options being looked at.
Morgan has discussed the CovidCard twice with Privacy Commissioner Edwards, whom he describes as a “smart guy”, but paranoid about any stalking horse for any type of national security card.
That’s a good paranoia to have, Morgan says, but he argues that in the case of the CovidCard, it’s misplaced. After a year, a card’s batteries die and the card dies with it.
Elsewhere, he’s less impressed with his CovidCard group’s interaction with the bureaucracy.
“The Ministry of Health does not have deep technology capabilities and only a small team which is like any other ministry,” Morgan says.
“They’re normally focused on database integrations and other work of a more corporate nature.
“We’ve found them very insular and they have a very difficult culture to engage with.
“We’ve done this work ourselves with only light integration in MoH who believe their app is able to achieve something — this is not supported by even the most cursory research and certainly not by any rigorous investigations.”
The ministry acknowledged but did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
More broadly, Morgan says, “No party is going to promote wearing a compulsory card around your neck as we approach an election during level 1.” And he adds, “We are very aware that New Zealanders are less inclined to wear a ‘silly card’ when there is evidently no Covid here.”
Edwards says, “No testing has been done to determine whether a widely diverse population will wear the card routinely in a compliant fashion.” But his gut instinct is that there would have to be a significant cultural shift.
What does Morgan think it would take? “Body bags,” he says.
“If you see bodies stacked up in refrigerated units, you’ll change your mind about wearing a card to the supermarket.”
If you see bodies stacked up in refrigerated units, you’ll change your mind about wearing a card to the supermarket.
Sam Morgan