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How refreshing! A civilized calm and informed discussion - please take a look

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Testing-and-Tracking COVID

Let's try to reach a sane balance in teeter-totter positives-and-negatives over Covid Testing:

1 First a positive from Bloomberg News: ". . .This critical repository of health information started, improbably, with three journalists, a data scientist/biotech investor, and a couple of spreadsheets. Back in late February, the coronavirus was still a sleeper threat in the U.S., with new cases popping up in ones and twos around the country and signs of hidden spread on the West Coast. Officials in the Trump administration held briefings touting the government’s rapid rollout of testing. But they couldn’t answer one important question: How many tests were being done? 

“It’s kind of mind-boggling that it’s fallen to a group of volunteers to do this”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-11-20/covid-tracking-project-volunteers-step-up-as-u-s-fails-during-pandemic?srnd=premium

Search for the Covid Tracking Project on Google Scholar, which compiles academic literature, and you’ll get more than 500 results, a sign of its standing in the scientific community. The project has helped force states to improve their disclosure of Covid data: In April, it started giving states letter grades on the quality of the data they reported. At first only 10 states got an A or A+; now 40 states and territories have reached that grade.

The project is a demonstration of citizen know-how and civic dedication at a time when the country feels like it’s being pulled apart. Yet it’s confounding that, almost a year into the pandemic, the Covid Tracking Project is doing what might be expected of the U.S. government

Data Heroes of Covid Tracking Project Are Still Filling U.S. Government Void

The volunteer effort has become a vital source of information on the pandemic.

Illustration: 731; Poster: Courtesy Library of Congress

2 Cautions from TechDirt

Research Shows iOS Covid Apps Are A Privacy Mess

Privacy

from the with-friends-like-these dept

Mon, Nov 23rd 2020 6:30am — Karl Bode

Jonathan Albright, director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, recently released analysis he did into 493 COVID-19 related iOS apps across dozens of countries. The results are...not great, and highlight how such apps routinely hoover up far more data than they need to, including unneeded access to cameras and microphones, your photo gallery, your contacts, and far more location data than is needed. Much of this data then winds up in the adtech ecosystem for profit, where it winds up in the hands of third parties.

Only 47 of the apps used Google and Apple's more privacy-friendly exposure-notification system, resulting in a number of folks building their own apps with substandard (in some cases borderline nonexistent) privacy standards. Six out of seven COVID iOS apps worldwide are allowed to request any permissions they'd like. 43 percent of all apps were found to be tracking user location at all times. 44% requested access to the users' camera, 22 percent asked for access to users' smartphone mic, 32 percent asked for access to users' photos, and 11 percent asked for full access to user contact lists.

Albright told Ars Technica that while many of these app makers may be well intentioned, they're often working at cross purposes, while hoovering up far more data than they actually need. Data that in many instances is then being sold to unknown third parties: > GO AHEAD AND DIG DEEPER

Israeli PM held secret talks in Saudi with Pompeo, crown prince

The Covid Tracking Project

Good-to-Know that we options > https://covidtracking.com/

The public deserves the most complete data available about COVID-19 in the US. No official source is providing it, so we are.

Our data powers crucial reporting and research. Here are just a few of the organizations that rely on our dataset.

Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins relies on our testing data for its COVID-19 Testing Insights Initiative, which brings data and expert analysis together in one place. The initiative is designed to help policymakers and the public understand the trajectory of the pandemic, and make decisions about the path forward.

The White House

The White House chose the COVID Tracking Project as the best source to cite for daily US test numbers in its “Opening Up America Again” testing strategy.

COVID Exit Strategy

Created by a group of public health and crisis experts, covidexitstrategy.org identifies critical interventions needed to stop the spread of COVID-19, and urges government decision-makers to apply them. They use our data to power a dashboard comparing each state’s interventions and testing levels with case counts and deaths over time.

See how we work, what we’re learning, and what’s changing in our data on our project blog.

• What We Know About Covid Testing Sensitivity

  To successfully manage the pandemic, we need tools for both surveillance and diagnosis, in the form of antigen tests and PCR tests.

  

  By Whet MoserNovember 23, 2020

• One Million Cases in Seven Days: This Week in COVID-19 Data, Nov 19

  Weekly cases grew 26 percent and nearly 80,000 people in the United States are hospitalized with COVID-19. That’s one-third higher than the nation’s previous record.

  By Artis Curiskis, Alice Goldfarb, Erin Kissane, Jessica Malaty Rivera, Kara Oehler, Joanna Pearlstein, & Peter WalkerNovember 19, 2020

Every day, our volunteers compile the latest numbers on tests, cases, hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every US state and territory.

See all data→

Latest totals:

181,142,529

Total test results

12,230,472

Cases

248,897

Deaths