Got to contribute some perspective on tech & #Covid19 from Taiwan to this piece by @HowellONeill. If you take one thing away from Taiwan, make it this:
Automated, app-based contact tracing cannot explain Taiwan’s success, BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT DOING IT.
technologyreview.com/2020/04/28/100…
Automated, app-based contact tracing cannot explain Taiwan’s success, BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT DOING IT.
technologyreview.com/2020/04/28/100…
@HowellONeill Hao-yuan Cheng from their CDC emphasised how unhelpful even phone location data had been because most relevant contacts are so close that people who test positive remember & know their names anyway. 
@HowellONeill They’re also not tracking people who test positive for #Covid19, another common misconception. Instead, everyone who tests positive needs to stay at a hospital, no matter how mild their symptoms are, so they don’t infect others. All their close contacts are put into quarantine.
@HowellONeill Taiwan *is* using location tracking to enforce the quarantines of these close contacts & returnees from abroad. But they’re also enforced through daily calls & quarantined people manually tracking their temperature. It’s not a tech problem per se, it’s an enforcement problem.
@HowellONeill Wuhan addressed this with a centralised quarantine. Either way, contact tracing needs to be combined with identifying & isolating close contacts to break infection chains before they take off - something that really seems to be missing from the conversation in Europe and the US.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean that contact-tracing apps can’t help at all. But we need to think about these technical tools in terms of how they fit into a broader strategy for fighting #Covid19, not as ends in and of themselves.
