[nomadking]

Originally Posted by jfman

Nomadking you are being selective, as ever. Italian hospitals were trying to contact trace - that isn’t the same as a national contact tracing system, driven by apps, digital data, AND who individuals can confirm they have been in contact with. The two aren’t comparable.

Your persistence in holding up South Korea’s problems as comparable with ours are laughable. Their problems are not having 100% success. Our problems are trying to have any meaningful success at all.

What do you mean “were allowed to be used in the UK” - we’ve left the EU and taken back control. We have a Parliament that legislates for what is permissible in this country.

You’ve finally quoted something relevant - South Korea ploughing thousands of tests at identifying cases and throwing resource at it. We, on the other hand as you appropriately quote for once, have Whitty who doesn’t see the value in trying to find every case. In a pandemic. Sums it up and we will continue to fail until the Government wake up to that.

Like herd immunity week though I expect the usual suspects in the thread to perform a sudden volte face when Government policy finally changes.

AGAIN, I'm NOT being selective. I'm NOT trawling hundreds of articles looking for the "required" quote. I'm also not prepared to simply blindly accept the utter garbage the UK media throws out. It just happened to be in the SAME article of a comparison between South Korea and Italy.

Italy started out testing widely, then narrowed the focus so that now, the authorities don’t have to process hundreds of thousands of tests. But there’s a trade-off: They can’t see what’s coming and are trying to curb the movements of the country’s entire population of 60 million people to contain the disease.

Now imagine extrapolating requiring 8,600 police officers and TWO thousand unidentified people, for EACH AND EVERY night club area in the UK. Is widespread use of phone data and CCTV and credit card details accepted in the UK? Of course not. South Korea put there systems in place after their 2015 MERS(Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak. As I've also previously pointed out, in South Korea they readily wear face masks/coverings. If South Korea hadn't had all their LAWS and systems in place BEFORE all this, then they would've also been badly affected. They identified a case where somebody was travelling to Japan via South Korea. By identifying that problem person, they prevented more cases occurring in Japan.

Seoul says it is building on lessons learned from an outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2015 and working to make as much information available as possible to the public. It has embarked on a massive testing program, including people who have very mild illness, or perhaps don’t even have symptoms, but who may be able to infect others. This includes enforcing a law that grants the government wide authority to access data: CCTV footage, GPS tracking data from phones and cars, credit card transactions, immigration entry information, and other personal details of people confirmed to have an infectious disease. The authorities can then make some of this public, so anyone who may have been exposed can get themselves - or their friends and family members - tested.

Doesn't look like South Korea has an app.

Testing of the Immuni contact-tracing app, designed to help Italy manage phase two of the coronavirus crisis, is to start from Monday June 8th after the country's privacy ombudsman gave the go-ahead.

The first trials of the app will begin in the regions of Liguria, Puglia, Marche and Abruzzo before later being rolled out nationwide, possibly by the following Monday, June 15th.
"We’re starting with a test that will last several days and then, next week or the week after, it will be extended to everyone," stated Deputy Health Minister Pierpaolo Sileri.
...
Use of the app is voluntary. Developed by Milan-based startup Bending Spoons, it works using Bluetooth.
After installation, it requires some basic personal details including your town of residence. After that, “the system will function automatically”, according the app's official website.
If two smartphones with the app installed are less than one metre apart, they exchange automatically generated codes which make it possible to trace previous contacts in case one of the users is diagnosed with the virus.

Isn't that what the UK media have been whinging about? Then again, what haven't they whinged about?

However, France, the UK and Norway - one of the first European countries to launch its app - are all using a technology in which a central server holds data on who came into contact with an infected person. Proponents of this approach say this facilitates the work of health officials but critics claim it raises privacy concerns.