NOVID Provides COVID-19 Early Warning System

Oh, I did let my friends know! I posted a link to your Tidbits article on my Facebook page. I also sent email to the Mayor of Fort Worth and asked if the city could perhaps promote use of the app.

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It’s really the combination of prevention (social distancing, masks, quarantine, crowd limits, modelling), detection (people testing, sewage testing), rapid response (medical response teams, QR registration, mobile phone tracing, travel passes, credit cards), strong expert messaging, and high degree of community agreement to controls and advice are the reasons for the low infection rates in Australia and in other countries taking similar approaches.

I guess if someone in your contact network gets the virus then NOVID might help alert that fact to others in your contact network and so reduce transmission rates. I cant work out if the data held by NOVID might be also used by medical tracing teams to trace the source and the spread of infection inside and outside your contact network.

The Apple, Google etc COVID-19 apps just didn’t work in Australia - poor design, poor usability, US-centric, etc.

It is heartening to see the new US Administration taking much needed action to reduce the spread of this virus and the deaths caused by this virus in the US.

Yes, the theory is that if you can see that someone only several degrees of separation away has been infected, you should take more precautions. If the nearest infections are far away, there would be no reason to change your behavior.

I don’t think so, because it’s entirely anonymous. I can’t see how contact tracing teams would be able to leverage it in any useful way at the individual level.

I installed the app and identified my community by zip code. I invited twenty contacts and got two signups. So now we have seven listed.
I also sent the developers two suggestions:
" I like the app. Consider adding a flag to identify if a person has received both doses of vaccine so that you can build a herd immunity network diagram."
" Hi, you need to improve your advertising!

  1. Add a QR code to the app that you can let strangers scan for your web site.
  2. Have a 1 page summary that people can print from the app to give to business managers.
  3. You need a contest to get more people enrolled. Something like every time the enrollment doubles in a specific zip code all active users have a chance to win money. The size of the award $ should grow to reflect the reduced probability of winning. Maybe some organization like Gates foundation would fund the awards."

Great suggestions, and I’ll pass them on. Their communications are fairly polished professional work, but they don’t seem to do much in the way of marketing. For instance, the NOVID site has a collection of printable signs but they’re all general to COVID-19, and none of them actually promote NOVID with a QR code. And they have a Style Guide, but none of the assets in there work for marketing either.

I’d also like to see the app prompting users to recommend it to another friend every so often—people will do it once but then not think about it again unless nudged. It could be a setting that could be turned off.

I am catching up on TidBITS articles, so I just installed NOVID. Discouraged to see that in my region, which has a population of over 200,000 people, I’m the lone adopter so far. I shared the article on my social networks, and I hope our collective efforts start to snowball.

Yeah, it seems that TidBITS readers are too widespread. I’ve seen the overall number of NOVID users increase by several thousand since that article ran (tap Settings), but it’s not taking off like I’d hoped.

I keep sending in suggestions to their feedback link (my latest):

Interesting article:

The article mentioned an opportunity for you:
Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, told me that everyone, vaccinated or not, should try to keep track of three metrics in your area: The number of new daily cases per 100,000 people, the rate at which people transmit the virus to one another, and the rate at which people test positive for the virus. Popescu said that there are no magic numbers that would immediately bring the country back to pre-COVID life, but she’ll feel better about reopening when we hit daily case rates of just one to two per 100,000, transmission rates of .5 or less, and test-positivity rates at or below 2 percent. (As of last week, no U.S. state had reached the trifecta, and the country as a whole is still far from it.) Many local public-health departments regularly provide these numbers.

I believe you could provide these numbers to people in your Novid.app since you already have zip code information and I suspect local health departments use that designation for sorting their Covid data. It may require an API or other approaches to extract data from the individual health departments.

Also, you could include a window with prompts to help people identify what their specific risk choices should be (anybody in your family over age…, anyone with compromised immune system or other underlying conditions, etc.

I really like the idea of the NOVID app providing those area-level stats

Whenever I’m curious about the rate per 100,000, I check the New York Times pages.

Test positivity is a trickier number because it’s dependent on the number of tests performed. Here in Tompkins County, where Cornell makes it possible to test 5000-10000 people per day, our positivity rate is incredibly low—usually around 0.2%. Next door, in Tioga County, where I grew up, they’re lucky if they do 400 tests per day and thus their positivity rate is much higher, about 4% of late.

But in general, yes, I find that one of the reasons I check NY’s COVID Alert NY app every day (other than to record that I’m feeling fine, thank you) is to check the county-level stats. NOVID could probably do better job of that.