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