Comment by adityaathalye
1 day ago
Hilariously (darkly), during the pandemic, the very same reason is why the very same administrators were hell-bent on forcing Bluetooth-always-on contact tracing on the whole country's smartphone-carrying population.
(edit: viz. that forcible peer-to-peer bluetooth networking works. One man's unrestricted mass-surveillance is another person's "terrorist activity". Oh how the turntables turn and turn.)
But that did save lives; I was able to know my family had Covid before the symptoms showed up. Happened with a lot of other people too.
Indeed, and it would have saved far more lives if leveraged the app to have hazmat crews come in a forcibly carry the infected to quarantine zones.
Didn't actually this happen in China?
Maybe the videos were fake, but I saw at least a couple of this happening.
9 replies →
I doubt it, unless their hazmat suits are bullet-proof.
9 replies →
Sadly that wasn't possible in the US political climate and maybe a million people lost their lives as a result.
4 replies →
Was your short term safety at the expense of long term safety? (assuming rights erosion and government failures ultimately harms safety long-term).
Medicine is literally the source of the concept of side effects, the idea that some helpful interventions have simultaneous harmful impacts.
For large-scale infectious disease --- epidemiology and public health --- quarantine and infection/contact tracing are very tried and true containment methods. Yes, these impose costs, particularly on individual liberties. What's key is having a well-governed, principled, high-integrity, trustworthy government which makes clearly-justified decisions as to when to impose such restrictions, and when to lift them. Sadly, this has become more difficult in recent years.
[flagged]
Fwiw what you are describing is literally survivorship bias.
4 replies →
If they had administered properly people wouldn't have been to the streets and spread the virus in the first place!
The most consequential public health failure during COVID was the denial that COVID was airborne, based on no scientific evidence.
The infection spread based on being in the same enclosed space as an infected person, and was not based on being only a few feet apart.
Was that 30 second bluetooth beacon ever switched off again?