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From the article Contact-tracing apps: good allies against the pandemic?
From the article Coronavirus: the situation in Switzerland
Swiss covid is a joke, it simply doesn't work
When diagnosed positive I entered that in the app. It said I would get a code in 2 hours and if I did not receive there was a number to call.
I did not receive so I called, person on the phone said it is not us and it can take 2 days. Never heard of them. Later on I got messages from the canton which also presented a telephone number that was not manned.
I would have liked the app to trace with whom I had been in contact and informed them(the objective of the app).
I had to sherlock holmes that myself so dont bother with the app I removed it
My husband and I only have the company phones and no external apps are allowed. Anyway, at the end of the day we used to leave the phones in the office. Now we have a small safe and we put in it the phones and the laptops after 17:30 and only take them out in the morning. They're safe there and if one catches fire it will not affect the house.
Why should it catch fire?
Downloaded it when it was available and have been running it ever since. I am skeptical that it is worth it because almost none of the people I ask have installed it themselves either out of naivety, mistrust of the technology or simply laziness.
The app could drastically shorten the time needed for fast tracing. There is nothing to be paranoid about. There is far more invasive digital tracking going on from FB to Google to even this website with its tracking cookies sniffing around the other sites you visit.
Please people, use the tracking app, take the vaccine if it is offered to you and wear your freaking masks!
No app. Our medical information is private and will stay private.
Just a short read will bring you up to speed. No medical or personal information of any kind is shared.
I honestly think paranoia is the biggest danger to public health these days.
Can this work? I only have a japanese phone connected to wifi and no subscription.
I don't have a private phone to install it on, and on the work phone you can only install company software.
Seriously? You said in another comment thread that you own a software development company and are planning on moving back to Australia. If I owned a software company I think I would have the wherewithal to install whatever app I felt like on my or my company’s phone.
I installed the app when it was launched, but have never received a notification of exposure/risk.
The app can only be successful if everyone installs it and inserts the code immediately.
I have it installed, but I don't think it will work because of the ridiculous delay between diagnosis and receiving the CovidCode. They should be issued by the test centers themselves and delivered with the result. Or better: you should receive an inactive code during your test visit and if you are infected, the test center can mark the code "active". Come on guys, let's at least try!
Thanks for your input; have you experienced this delay yourself? Who sends out the CovidCode, under the current system?
A colleague reported it on a workplace Slack.
The CovidCodes come from OFSP, from a relatively simple website, which as far as I know is not a bottleneck. But only the cantonal doctors can login and issue them. So the bottleneck should be the same one as always: contact tracing.
I think issuing the CovidCode needs to be decoupled from the formal contact tracing process, so that even when the cantonal capacity for contact tracing is overwhelmed, the app can still do anonymous, automatic contact tracing.
I strongly believe that the pandemic is real and the virus can injure and even kill people prematurely.
However I do not have much confidence in the tracing and tracking approach carried out by the BAG. The shameless and defiant opponents of the pandemic measures make this even harder.
We are all fatigued by this virus and the nervous situation but it does not mean the pandemic is a hoax. Shame on those people who cry wolf all the time.
I have not installed the APP. I just avoid people as much as I can. I meet friends and family online using Zoom. I don't socialize. I have enough food for 3 months. The only way to get rid of the virus is for everyone to stock up on about 3 weeks worth of food / drink and shut down, everywhere. It would be faster than partial shutdowns.
what about essential workers... nurses, doctors etc!
I'm Swiss by origin but have been living in Santa Monica, California for 40 years. Most of my friends and I here believe that the Coronavirus is fake and is actually some kind of flu virus. What we call the hidden Elites, Illuminati or Deep State are out to control us and muzzle us like slave dogs with the ridiculous ineffective masks. Population reduction being the end goal. And we believe the number of cases are highly exaggerated. They make them up as they go along. It's part of the Deep State's agenda which began with the 911 dynamited towers which was in inside job. We are not interested in invasive apps. The way they were able to lock down the entire world in a few weeks points to an extraordinarily brilliant planning strategy that was years in the making. It's just common sense.
We call it Scamdemic. Control by fear mongering. We are wide awake and believe nothing that comes out of news media who have sold out for fame, money, or out of fear.
I have had the SwissCovid app installed pretty much since it launched, and most of my friends did as well. (I have never heard of Social pass before reading the comments here and don't have it installed)
A few weeks ago I started feeling bad, got tested and the test came back positive for Covid 19.
The test results came back 24h after, but it took the cantonal contact tracing people 4 days to contact me and give me a code to put into the app. When I finally got the code, only 2 out of 8 of the people that had close contact with me in the days before getting sick got the notification.
The fundamental problem of contact tracing in Switzerland is that it's so manual - someone calls you on the phone and asks questions.
It would be much more effective if it were more automated.
E.g., all tests presumably get added to some database so that the cantonal contact tracing people can know to call you if your test came back positive. I don't understand why you don't automatically get an email and an SMS if you tested positive that give you some sort of access code and send you to a web form that asks all the questions that contact tracing people ask? They ask for emails and phone numbers of your recent contacts, it would be much more effective if you could just enter them into a web form, they get stored somewhere, and all those people get an email and an SMS as well.
And you could have contact tracing people call people who didn't fill in their forms e.g. 2-3 hours after getting them, so that would be an option for non-tech-savvy people.
I don't know what legal and privacy implications there are to having an approach like this, but today you already have to give your contact information if you test positive, and you already have to tell contact tracing people information about your contacts, and then the contact tracing people add that information somewhere and your contacts get an automated SMS.
Interesting to hear about your experience - thank you for sharing - and hope you're feeling better!
Do you know of other countries / places where contact tracing works more like the automated system you describe? What do you think are the differences between those places and Switzerland in terms of how and why they're able to carry out contact tracing differently?
I had social pass and seriously why they did not do just a website with you account so you just add places and time on as you do with app, but app is scary and invasive and also does not work well, but website would be more acceptable for the people and mor epeople could use it as app is not compatible with every phone.
There are many fundamental issues with these apps that have not been addressed, which I'll summarize here:
1) Foremost, the Epidemics Act had to be amended to make the SwissCovid App legal, which from the beginning creates a lot of doubts and raised eyebrows. But it is understood that the database is decentralized and no personal user data is saved for longer than 14 days, so let's set aside the privacy issues for now.
2) The app requires BOTH Bluetooth and GPS to be turned on due to the technical design and this is where problems start. If the user has Bluetooth on but not GPS, the app does not track. Vice versa if the Bluetooth isn't on, the app does not track. You will have many users who do not understand how to use the app properly.
3) The next point is then if indeed both are turned on and the app is working, it will drain the phone of its battery very quickly. At some point the phone will die, so the app will not track.
4) Some people might install the app and think they don't have to do anything else, in which case the app will not track.
5) There are issues with false positives, where the app might trigger an event, even though there was a wall between the two people. This issue cannot be so easily addressed.
6) The larger problem are the false negatives, which are all the people who have NOT installed the app whatsoever. This rate is so high that tracing will simply never work because of such a high false negative rate.
7) Quite a few people are asymptomatic, meaning they will not even know they are infectious, so the app will not warn anyone around them of potential infection.
8) Once a person is tested positive, they are given a code they need to input into the app. The whole tracing then works under the assumption the person HAS the app installed and configured properly, as well as on their honesty to actually input this code. Those who are tested positive should not be out and about anyway, and should be isolating instead. So how many true positives you will see wandering around?
9) This is unconfirmed, but I've read that it can take 24-48 hours for the code to be delivered to the person, in which case this leaves the most infectious time window open for the person to spread the virus, without the app tracing it.
10) Also unconfirmed, but I've read when you've been infected once and have inputted the code, afterwards the app will essentially "shut down", because it is assumed you are now immune to re-infection. This is a complete fallacy, as a person can easily get infected the second time. In this case, when the user tries to input the new code AGAIN, the app will not be responsive and will not track.
11) A great many phone models are not supported, for example the app does not work with Xiaomi phones. This leaves a big gap in how many people can install it. Many people experience errors and crashes with the app as well.
12) There are also many older people who simply do not know how to use all these sciency gadgety beepa boopa. And these are the most vulnerable of them all.
13) And even in the unfortunate event that the app tells the person they have to isolate because they were in close proximity to a positive person more than 15 minutes, you really think our employer will allow us to take 2 weeks of paid sick leave? My employer does not even allow home office and the only offer I had was unpaid leave of absence. Nobody is going to risk their job during a global crisis because some app told them to.
Ultimately you will have many people who will NOT install the app at all. This whole tracing system might be helpful to a certain degree, but I don't see it ever working in the long run nor on a large scale.
When SwissCovid was introduced, I looked under the hood of the system and found a few conceptional flaws. As the creators had correctly pointed out, one important point is inevitable because of our data protection law. Therefore, it is entirely based upon voluntary participation. Does anyone know how many persons who tested positive are actually registering their code delivered by sanitary authorities? As we know, the system only works efficiently providing everybody owns a compatible phone, and has both, the Bluetooth and mobile internet connection, enabled. On the other hand, it is easy to see whether other persons are wearing a clinical face mask correctly and respect social distancing. For me, the system is not efficient enough and can even inspire a false sense of security to people who have not looked into details.
Have installed SwissCovid and SocialPass. The problem is that people are not using these apps honestly because they fear to be put in quarantine. That's why tracing is not working.
Thanks for sharing your experience; can you share a bit more about what SocialPass is, and how it works?
I did, but because I can't keep Bluetooth on all day every day because it sucks my batter dry too fast, it's probably not helping me as much as it could.
I have installed the COVID app, but I think we are losing the ability to track due to low install rates, and other systems people are relying on will be its failure.
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