COVID complacency is a serious threat to public health. COVID hasn’t gone away. Vaccines haven’t become pointless – and it’s a good idea to keep wearing your mask.
For now, it seems the benefits to Australia’s public health may be better served by other technology. And the public cost of maintaining the COVIDSafe app may not be in our collective interest.
New Zealand has joined a long list of countries using Google and Apple’s mobile contact tracing framework. But if it’s not compatible with Australia’s app, what does that mean for travellers?
Australia has hesitated in the past to adopt a strong privacy framework. A new government review provides an opportunity to improve data protection rules to an internationally competitive standard.
Michael Hopkin, The Conversation; Wes Mountain, The Conversation, and Liam Petterson, The Conversation
Victorian Premier Dan Andrews and Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton on Sunday announced steps to slowly ease COVID-19 restrictions in metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria. There are four steps…
My analysis suggests when COVID-19 cases reach 100 over 14 days, an outbreak gets very difficult to control — as we saw in Victoria. Over the last fortnight, NSW has recorded at least 154 new cases.
Eating at a restaurant and want to stay COVID safe? Check to see if staff are sanitising surfaces, wearing masks, using contactless payment, and spacing out customers.
Buddhist monks in Thailand continue to collect alms from households, despite the threat of the coronavirus. The reason: the practice is an important part of merit-making.
Despite disappointing download numbers and almost zero success in tracing COVID-19 infections, Australia is persisting with the COVIDSafe app, while the rest of the world embraces the ‘Gapple’ model.
Smart city solutions have proved handy for curbing the contagion, but recent experience has also shown how much they rely on public trust. And that in turn depends on transparency and robust safeguards
COVIDSafe uses Bluetooth radio waves. These can only measure how physically close two people are, but not if those people are in the same room, or even in different cars passing each other.
The COVIDSafe app hasn’t come out of nowhere. The promises of ‘smart city’ data collection may be seductive, but we must always weigh up what we’re being asked to give up in return.