Patents on the soles of your shoes...: Terminology

Saturday, July 24, 2021

Terminology – Pingdemic (pingdémie)

Imagine being encouraged to voluntarily download a clever little app, able to detect via Bluetooth® low-energy handshakes, all the people you have been in contact with, if you were to test positive for the SARS-coronavirus-2. Then, imagine such an app pinging (alerting) all the folks at risk, to inform them that they need to self-isolate, depending on the distance of the contact, amount of exposure, time, date and location, as processed by an infectious diseases risk-assessment algorithm.

Conversely, imagine receiving such a ping, alerting you that you have been in contact with someone infected, and that consequently: You need to self-isolate. The tracing and the pinging would be the ying of the brilliant UK-NHS (United Kingdom-National Health System) contact-tracing app, called COVID 19. However, the yang of this fabulous little app is over-sensitivity. For example, when the app detects your neighbors through walls as contacts. Or, when the app pings you to self-isolate, upon detecting contact with a CoV2-positive person, after you have been vaccinated.

Such is now the pending dilemma in the United Kingdom, which is re-opening its economy. A dilemma causing another sort of torment, dubbed the pingdemic.

Only the results of interview-based contact-tracing obligate a person to self-isolate in the UK. Thus, people are essentially free to ignore what the app suggests. However, since the UK is also currently facing another serious surge of COVID 19 infections, due to the Delta mutation, a corollary surge in ping-related job walkouts has also occurred. A surge of ping-notified self-isolations that is perceived as undoing the scheduled re-opening of the economy, considering that even vaccinated folks are pinged. All of which warrants a major update in the app’s risk-assessment algorithms.

Without evaluation of the app's ping-effectiveness in curbing infections, or raising a privacy-related pingdissent discussion, screen captures of the brilliant, UK NHS contact-tracing app, are included below. In particular, the app's set-up steps are depicted.