The global is becoming, and to stay on its feet, local wisdom is needed in a global context.
The global is becoming and to remain standing, local wisdom is needed in a global context.
Using the Bluetooth generation to combat Covid-19, the new Covid Alert SA smartphone app is the latest technological breakthrough in the war against the virus. Here, BizNews founder Alec Hogg speaks with Gaurang Tanna, the Ministry’s Head of Policy Coordination and Integrated Planning. Health: about how the app works, how it protects your privacy, and most importantly, how it has the potential to save the lives of countless people. – Jarryd Neves
Yes, I have generation experience and I am an enthusiastic public fitness professional who has worked for more than a decade in the Ministry of Health. This has made me someone who has a hybrid skill between public fitness and generation.
And definitely keep up with the world’s developments. I see you’ve taken advantage of Google and Apple and that’s very vital from a privacy perspective. But how do you start creating an app that you hope each and every South African will download?
Therefore, there are other modalities used across countries around the world. We have had the merit of learning from many other countries. Like Singapore, for example, which has started using BlueTrace. The UK uses a centralised style to achieve the same goal. I’ve been tracking several countries that have to opt in to an Apple/Google exposure notification. It was a trade-off between the extent to which we can cater to our visitor and the degree of “privacy” of the app.
We need to make sure that the app is susceptible to privacy breaches. To achieve that public acceptance, we want it to be effective, so that a public fitness intervention works. We hope we have made the right decision. Time will tell how many downloads we’ll get. Globally, countries have struggled to reach maximum adoption rates, but we hope that privacy may not be one of the reasons why South Africans would not download this app.
It’s very attractive that you mention this because the story of total privacy is becoming more and more common. I don’t know if you watch the Netflix series House of Cards, but even there, in this very popular series, there are those nefarious industrialists who trick other people into downloading an app so they can check where they’re going. I guess that’s on the minds of a lot of other people in the audience. Now they’re concerned about privacy. So how are we once we download this app?
So the way the app works is that you download it, with the goal of receiving a notification from other people who might test positive later and might have contacted you. Therefore, it is very important that other people download this application before. they get infected. We inspire all South Africans to download the app. In the event that they come into contact with a positive user and hope that this user also has the app, they may be protected.
The index case will then be to tell you that they have contacted you and have now tested positive. If you walk into a supermarket and some other positive user has come into close contact with you, you didn’t know you had the virus. – That user could, a few days later, inform you about their diagnosis in the app. The app will do the rest, notifying all the close contacts the user has come into contact with.
Now I feel it. But the challenge here is for Big Brother to know where you are at all times. So how do we get out of this?
A very vital question. Here’s how it works. I would have the app installed on my phone. You would have the app installed on your phone. The app doesn’t know my name. Your app doesn’t know your name. Both apps have unique identifiers. If we come into close contact with other people, say within two meters, or for a sufficient amount of time, such as 15 minutes (we use the WHO as an advisor on this), the apps will exchange identifiers. Let’s say a few days later, I report a positive result. I didn’t know I had come into contact with you. Only our phones know that this phone has been heavily exposed to this phone.
Only our phones know that this phone has been heavily exposed to this phone.
So, their phones are their oblique measure of the distance between two people. I would notify my device of my positive diagnosis using the PIN code that would have been sent to me by the Ministry of Health. The app would then notify all close contacts and do the rest.
And is it all part of this task that Apple and Google have put in place to ensure that there are no abuses?
So there are two key pieces of generation that make this work. The first is Apple/Google interoperability between the two sets of devices and the app itself. The moment is the validation of something positive. What you don’t need is for a user to intentionally come into close contact with thousands of other people and then fictitiously report a positive result to create panic in the system. The application has a built-in validation process. Each user with a positive result will receive a PIN. By the way, PINs are sent to both positives and negatives.
It is by capturing this PIN, as well as your date of birth, that the app will verify it against our Covid Connect formula and determine that you are a true positive and allow for key exchange. This is just to make sure that the consistency of the formula is not compromised in any way. But those are two completely different services. The validation service and the exposure notification service that we use with Google and Apple are completely independent of each other and therefore largely maintain privacy.
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It’s very sensible. Too bad, although it wasn’t available six months ago. Why did it take so long to set up?
From the beginning we initiated manual touch tracking strategies. We then opted for a service based on SMS and WhatsApp, largely due to their penetration in South Africa. We know that more than 35 million South Africans use WhatsApp, and we thought it would be a useful price and wouldn’t force anyone to download an app. We know that many countries have struggled with this issue, especially in the early days when the formula was implemented. Secondly, we sought to be informed about the process.
When building Covid Connect, what seems like an undeniable user interface, to both healthcare professionals and citizens, is based on a very complex architecture. It has an architecture where we rely on the effects of public and personal laboratories across South Africa. It is then transmitted to Covid Connect, which sends SMS messages and sends it, along with citizen reports, to healthcare professionals. The full integration procedure is a very complicated procedure. We are very pleased that we did, because without it we would not be able to set up a validation service that we now use with the Covid Alert app.
In March 2020, we announced a WhatsApp service for fitness prevention messages. A month later, we started searching for threat self-assessment capskill on this WhatsApp channel. A month or two later, we added the ability to get lab effects through WhatsApp. , report touches anonymously via SMS and monitor the physical status of index instances via WhatsApp. In the same number of months, we now have a Covid alert app. As you can see, we are looking to use all available technologies to improve power. of the tactile tracking process.
This is very positive in the long term for several reasons, such as the fact that the government is adopting the generation and in as complicated a way as you have. But what have you gained in the personal sector? I see in your FAQ that Discovery Health, for example, has put a lot of thought into this entire process. What are you talking about?
We were lucky to have the Discovery team on our side. They made all the paintings voluntarily. The app itself was created with the support of Discovery. But let me also mention the advertising banks in South Africa (the South African Banking Association and its members) who have been very interested in this task from the beginning. They are going to use the media we have produced (plus their own) to widely market the service and the app itself for broader adoption. I must mention the cellular network operators.
We have been very lucky to have Vodacom, MTN, Cell C and Telkom. Everyone came to the party without hesitation, with a preference for this project, to encourage communication and inspire our population to download it. You’re covering the 4 largest telecom corporations and the five largest banks in South Africa, you’re targeting a number of South Africans. We hope that the call to action of those corporations will definitely be won through our population that will download the app. A classic partnership between the public and private sectors.
It’s wonderful to see. I hope there is an oversight about this, but I didn’t see Capitec being discussed among the banks?
Capitec is us. Several banks have proposed to deeply link their own mobile apps to this app to encourage downloads. Capitec is one of the banks that is also looking to find the most productive way to achieve this, but all have submitted their offers in the market. This product through their websites, through their virtual communication channels, through the other channels they have with their customers, to achieve wider adoption across the country.
Is it enough to download the app? Is there a website?Is it on the Apple App Store or the Google App Store?Where can you get it?
Both Android and Apple app outlets offer the app for download. All you need to do is search for Covid Alert SA. We’ve also been running on Huawei’s app store, as they have sort of a split tactic with Google, and we’ll get there soon. We know that 80-85 percent of smartphone users in South Africa use Android devices, and perhaps 18-20 percent of smartphone users in South Africa use Android devices. We also know older versions of Huawei cell phones, which use Google Play Store. I think we represent a giant portion of the smartphone population in South Africa.
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Then you have the app, which will make touch tracking easier, make it much cheaper, and save our taxpayers from having to do it manually. You have discussed privacy issues with us. However, he previously said it is of little use. How will you face this challenge?
Therefore, as mentioned, many countries used two other modalities. I think there were probably two or three main fears that got in the way of this project. The first is that other people are afraid that we might get attached to them. It can only be that Bluetooth drains the battery too much, which will cause it to be used for a long time. The third thing might be that we take non-public data and use it for other purposes.
Now, the merit of Google and Apple’s exposure notification service allows us to address those issues in one way or another. Privacy, because they wouldn’t allow us to put anything else in the app than that. When it comes to battery drain, the BlueTrace protocol, for example, implemented across Singapore, was one of the first large-scale implementations. The BlueTrace protocol had significant battery drain, but this was solved with Apple and Google as they backed it up by integrating part of the generation into the operational formula and optimization. as much as possible. The third fear relates to non-public information. This is also taken into account, largely because Apple and Google wouldn’t need us to put anything else in the app, apart from what is used for this exclusive purpose.
We hope to be able to achieve the large-scale adoption we want to achieve the highest power imaginable. Early studies have shown that 60% of the population wants to download this app. We have been in contact with the Big Data Institute in Oxford and their following findings revealed that a power of as little as 10-15% can be achieved, albeit on a smaller scale or degree. Our goal is to achieve 10 million downloads, which is about a third of South Africa’s smartphone population, and it doesn’t have to be nationwide coverage. So if you have 60% in a sub-geography (e. g. , in a specific neighborhood, suburb, or supermarket), the app will effectively be founded to achieve that power.
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