May 7, 2020 • 8 mins
Researchers at 3 universities have received a federal research grant to create a contact tracing mobile app for students that could track a person’s real-time location and symptoms and would calculate a type of social credit score that determines your COVID-19 risk and also a risk score for locations. Tami Abdollah, senior reporter at Dot LA, joins us for how some universities hope to keep students safe.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Thursday, May seven. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily
Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is your daily
coronavirus update. Researchers at three universities have received federal research
grants to create a contact tracing mobile app for students
that could track a person's real time location and symptoms,
and it would calculate a type of social credit score
(00:21):
that determines your COVID nineteen risk and also a risk
score for locations. Tammy Abdolah, senior reporter at dot l A,
joins us for how some universities hope to keep students safe.
Thanks for joining us, Tammy, thanks so much, glad to
be here. I wanted to talk about contact tracing and
this kind of notion of a social credit score. You know,
(00:43):
everybody's been saying contact tracing is one of those key
elements that states are gonna need to reopen their economies
and also track the spread of the virus so that
we don't fall into this thing where we have hotspots
again and we overload the health care system. And right now,
research at the University of Southern California, Emory University, and
the University of Texas Health Science Center. They've all received
(01:05):
a federal research grant to create a mobile app for
contact tracing. Tammy tell us a little bit about this.
So what they're trying to do is they're trying to
figure out a way to provide people with a sense
of the risk that they face of getting COVID nineteen
and of the areas that they're visiting giving them COVID nineteen.
(01:29):
So the idea that they've sort of been working on
is creating this sort of risk score that you get
based on the various locations you travel to, and those
locations would be gathered via your phone. You know, you'd
have to turn on location tracking and doing that, they
sort of put together a risk score based on all
(01:49):
the various places you went. So if you stay at
home all day, every day for weeks at a time,
your riskcore would probably be rather low. But if you're
going out and you're delivering for Amazon, your risk score
my be rather high. And then they would take all
the locations that you've been to and where people end
up gathering at and create an aggregate risk score for
(02:10):
those areas. And one of the reasons why this is
being done this way through technology is they say that
the spread of the virus is moving too fast for
manual contact tracing. So the traditional ways, somebody would call
you on the phone say hey, you either tested positive
or you might have been in an area or you
know somebody that has tested positive, and then you go
(02:33):
through the whole rounds. You know you should self isolate,
blah blah blah, all that stuff. And they're saying that
that's a little too slow for the spread that's going
on right now. So they want to do this in
a technological way, where as you mentioned, they can create
the maps. It can ping you maybe if you're going
to an area that could be a potential hotspot. So
this is kind of where they're going just to help out.
(02:53):
The issue is that a lot of people don't even
know they have this, and yet they are contagious for
one to two days for they actually developed symptoms. So
it's just moving so quickly and relying on human memory
to remember everyone you dealt with, met up with, Especially
if we start reopening society even more in a day
or in two days, it's hard to remember who you
(03:14):
were in touch with, let alone fourteen days. And so
the idea is technology can do a lot better job
remembering things. And once you start building enough data together
and getting these aggregate scores put together of risk and
also adding in more testing, then you start seeing, for example,
if someone's risk score is between zero and one, so
(03:34):
zero no risk one, you have it. You can see
that once you aggregate for an area, when people start
turning into ones. Oh, they ended up getting it. Well,
the overall risk for everywhere they went to over those
fourteen days goes up, and you can see your overall
risk go up as well. When are the universities getting
started on this and when are they expected to have
(03:56):
some type of app ready to go for widespread use.
So they started officially working on this per the grant
on Friday, so this past Friday, May first, and the
idea is that they will have this worked through and
developed in the hopes of being able to put it
forward for their student populations should they do returning the
(04:16):
class in August or for the false semester. So that's
sort of the plan that Saar Shahabi over at USC
mentioned to me that they were all sort of discussing.
He hopes to have it ready in time for August
for USC students, specifically, some of the problems that are
associated with this all the time is concerns about privacy
and then widespread adoption. There's always these concerns that people
(04:38):
are just not going to want to download it, and
they're not going to want to opt in for the
location tracking for fear that they're going to be tracked,
for fear that somebody will know where they're at at
all times. What have people involved with the grant, what
have they said with regards to that. They basically say that, hey, look,
you opt into location tracking for convenience all the time,
(04:59):
whether it's for your map app or for a game,
or for social reasons or free help. So they're's sort
of argument is that this is a way to ensure
society can return back to normal and that the economy
can keep running and people also can be aware of
the risk that they carry and that they may be
exposed to. The flip side is that people who are
(05:20):
really concerned about people's privacy and surveillance, like folks at
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are obviously worried about what this
actually looks like. It's a concern obviously, but in places
where they have done some of these things, South Korea
and China, they've used these location based digitized contract tracing.
(05:40):
It's been pretty successful obviously the areas where you know
there's mandated compliance so you got to get around that,
but it has shown to be pretty effective. And going
back to the manual contact tracing, when things are moving
so fast, getting a ping on your phone might just
help you avoid a problem spot that much quicker. It
would certainly just give you a better sense. And I
(06:02):
think the argument put forward here by the professor who's
sort of leading this at USC side of things, is
that there have been other methodologies put for so obviously
there's the manual method, which is just super slow and
requires a lot of resources. And obviously Google and Apple
are put forward sort of a bluetooth method. But you know,
when you rely on technology and the Bluetooth signals, then
(06:26):
you come up with other problems such as what if
your signal isn't working well? What if you are informing
people that they have been exposed to someone with it,
but they don't really know what to do, And we
don't even really know how effective that might be in
areas with tall buildings just where the signal might not
be great. Doesn't take into account whether people wearing masks
(06:47):
or not, because the idea is to keep it rather private,
um and to just have the technology do the work
and give you a heads up. And so they're sort
of trying to come up with a compromise between manual
tracing and simply just a bluetooth f y. I that
this professor worries would lead people to be sort of
alarmed continuously that they might have been exposed, not know
(07:10):
what to do, and then just be like, well, forget that,
there's nothing I can do. Anyways I might have been
I might not have been continue with my life. So
they're trying to come up with a compromise, if you will.
But there are concerns with all of the methods and
there's not any sort of perfect way to go about this.
Thus far, all the experts agree that contact tracing is
needed to help reopen all of our economies, and I
(07:32):
know states are already starting to train people in contact tracing.
So I'm sure we're going to be hearing a lot
more about this app once things start developing a little
bit more. Tammy Abdolah, Senior reporter at dot l A,
thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much,
really appreciate it. I'm Moscar Ramirez and this has been
your daily coronavirus Upteve, don't forget effort today's big news stories.
(07:56):
You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast
every Monday through Friday, so follow us on iHeart Radio
or wherever you get your podcasts
It's Thursday, May seven. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily
Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is your daily
coronavirus update. Researchers at three universities have received federal research
grants to create a contact tracing mobile app for students
that could track a person's real time location and symptoms,
and it would calculate a type of social credit score
(00:21):
that determines your COVID nineteen risk and also a risk
score for locations. Tammy Abdolah, senior reporter at dot l A,
joins us for how some universities hope to keep students safe.
Thanks for joining us, Tammy, thanks so much, glad to
be here. I wanted to talk about contact tracing and
this kind of notion of a social credit score. You know,
(00:43):
everybody's been saying contact tracing is one of those key
elements that states are gonna need to reopen their economies
and also track the spread of the virus so that
we don't fall into this thing where we have hotspots
again and we overload the health care system. And right now,
research at the University of Southern California, Emory University, and
the University of Texas Health Science Center. They've all received
(01:05):
a federal research grant to create a mobile app for
contact tracing. Tammy tell us a little bit about this.
So what they're trying to do is they're trying to
figure out a way to provide people with a sense
of the risk that they face of getting COVID nineteen
and of the areas that they're visiting giving them COVID nineteen.
(01:29):
So the idea that they've sort of been working on
is creating this sort of risk score that you get
based on the various locations you travel to, and those
locations would be gathered via your phone. You know, you'd
have to turn on location tracking and doing that, they
sort of put together a risk score based on all
(01:49):
the various places you went. So if you stay at
home all day, every day for weeks at a time,
your riskcore would probably be rather low. But if you're
going out and you're delivering for Amazon, your risk score
my be rather high. And then they would take all
the locations that you've been to and where people end
up gathering at and create an aggregate risk score for
(02:10):
those areas. And one of the reasons why this is
being done this way through technology is they say that
the spread of the virus is moving too fast for
manual contact tracing. So the traditional ways, somebody would call
you on the phone say hey, you either tested positive
or you might have been in an area or you
know somebody that has tested positive, and then you go
(02:33):
through the whole rounds. You know you should self isolate,
blah blah blah, all that stuff. And they're saying that
that's a little too slow for the spread that's going
on right now. So they want to do this in
a technological way, where as you mentioned, they can create
the maps. It can ping you maybe if you're going
to an area that could be a potential hotspot. So
this is kind of where they're going just to help out.
(02:53):
The issue is that a lot of people don't even
know they have this, and yet they are contagious for
one to two days for they actually developed symptoms. So
it's just moving so quickly and relying on human memory
to remember everyone you dealt with, met up with, Especially
if we start reopening society even more in a day
or in two days, it's hard to remember who you
(03:14):
were in touch with, let alone fourteen days. And so
the idea is technology can do a lot better job
remembering things. And once you start building enough data together
and getting these aggregate scores put together of risk and
also adding in more testing, then you start seeing, for example,
if someone's risk score is between zero and one, so
(03:34):
zero no risk one, you have it. You can see
that once you aggregate for an area, when people start
turning into ones. Oh, they ended up getting it. Well,
the overall risk for everywhere they went to over those
fourteen days goes up, and you can see your overall
risk go up as well. When are the universities getting
started on this and when are they expected to have
(03:56):
some type of app ready to go for widespread use.
So they started officially working on this per the grant
on Friday, so this past Friday, May first, and the
idea is that they will have this worked through and
developed in the hopes of being able to put it
forward for their student populations should they do returning the
(04:16):
class in August or for the false semester. So that's
sort of the plan that Saar Shahabi over at USC
mentioned to me that they were all sort of discussing.
He hopes to have it ready in time for August
for USC students, specifically, some of the problems that are
associated with this all the time is concerns about privacy
and then widespread adoption. There's always these concerns that people
(04:38):
are just not going to want to download it, and
they're not going to want to opt in for the
location tracking for fear that they're going to be tracked,
for fear that somebody will know where they're at at
all times. What have people involved with the grant, what
have they said with regards to that. They basically say that, hey, look,
you opt into location tracking for convenience all the time,
(04:59):
whether it's for your map app or for a game,
or for social reasons or free help. So they're's sort
of argument is that this is a way to ensure
society can return back to normal and that the economy
can keep running and people also can be aware of
the risk that they carry and that they may be
exposed to. The flip side is that people who are
(05:20):
really concerned about people's privacy and surveillance, like folks at
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are obviously worried about what this
actually looks like. It's a concern obviously, but in places
where they have done some of these things, South Korea
and China, they've used these location based digitized contract tracing.
(05:40):
It's been pretty successful obviously the areas where you know
there's mandated compliance so you got to get around that,
but it has shown to be pretty effective. And going
back to the manual contact tracing, when things are moving
so fast, getting a ping on your phone might just
help you avoid a problem spot that much quicker. It
would certainly just give you a better sense. And I
(06:02):
think the argument put forward here by the professor who's
sort of leading this at USC side of things, is
that there have been other methodologies put for so obviously
there's the manual method, which is just super slow and
requires a lot of resources. And obviously Google and Apple
are put forward sort of a bluetooth method. But you know,
when you rely on technology and the Bluetooth signals, then
(06:26):
you come up with other problems such as what if
your signal isn't working well? What if you are informing
people that they have been exposed to someone with it,
but they don't really know what to do, And we
don't even really know how effective that might be in
areas with tall buildings just where the signal might not
be great. Doesn't take into account whether people wearing masks
(06:47):
or not, because the idea is to keep it rather private,
um and to just have the technology do the work
and give you a heads up. And so they're sort
of trying to come up with a compromise between manual
tracing and simply just a bluetooth f y. I that
this professor worries would lead people to be sort of
alarmed continuously that they might have been exposed, not know
(07:10):
what to do, and then just be like, well, forget that,
there's nothing I can do. Anyways I might have been
I might not have been continue with my life. So
they're trying to come up with a compromise, if you will.
But there are concerns with all of the methods and
there's not any sort of perfect way to go about this.
Thus far, all the experts agree that contact tracing is
needed to help reopen all of our economies, and I
(07:32):
know states are already starting to train people in contact tracing.
So I'm sure we're going to be hearing a lot
more about this app once things start developing a little
bit more. Tammy Abdolah, Senior reporter at dot l A,
thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much,
really appreciate it. I'm Moscar Ramirez and this has been
your daily coronavirus Upteve, don't forget effort today's big news stories.
(07:56):
You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast
every Monday through Friday, so follow us on iHeart Radio
or wherever you get your podcasts
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