I’ve been wondering why this is not done. It seems so obvious, so there must be a good reason.

When doing covid testing, ask people questions like

  • how many times did you get a bus this week
  • or visit a hairdresser
  • does your office/apartment have AC or natural ventilation
  • do you share accommodation like in a barracks, retirement home, hostel

Then you or all this in MS excel and run a correlation. Of positives, how many people did X or Y or both. Of negatives, how many petiole did X or Y or both. The statistical functions tell you which patterns are important.

This instantly tells you the risk of each activity. It can guide people and authorities.

  1. People could be given a target, normalised to the reproduction number - all your activities this week must add to less than 1.

  2. Authorities can know the exact statistical risk of an activity. Exactly how big will be the effect of closing pubs, or hairdressers, or taking barman over 50 or of work? You can have as granular data as you like.

If you look up micromorts on Wikipedia it’s a similar idea.


All we know about covid risks, everything news channels and governments repeat in their echo chambers, is either extrapolated from other diseases, anecdotal, or speculation. We could easy grasp the true exact data, with as much granularity as needed, with no extra effort from what is done today.

This should be the headline news. Instead of “cases went up this week” we could know that “Cases among 40s-50s linked to AC ventilated pubs, where people stayed 1 hour, went up this week”

Why not?

  • @roastpotatothiefOP
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    3 years ago

    Two possible methods to get ANONYMOUS data from covid tests. (one big problem with contact tracing is that it’s not anonymous, so there is the fudge factor - most people will not be honest about breaking the covid regulations)

    There are pros and cons to each method here, and probably other possible methods too.

    These work for patients with internet access. I didn’t bother developing a method which works by post, so I suggest people getting results by post are exempted from the survey. People who choose to do the survey and get results online will get their results much sooner anyway.



    If the survey is done in the clinic just before the test: You fill in the survey, then tear off and keep a copy of the survey ID number. When the result is ready, the letter/email contains the SLC. Follow the link in the email (for example it could be www.covidtest.com/results/C) and enter the SID. The clinic links the SID to the test result. The website provides the TLC. The user follows another email link and enters the TLC and the PID. This instructs the clinic to provide the cert.

    If the survey is done online from home, when the test result is ready: An email is sent containing the TLC. Follow the link in the email (for example it could be www.covidtest.com/results/C) and do the survey. The survey result and SID are linked to the test result. A TLC is provided. The patient follows another link from the email and enters the TLC. This instructs the clinic to provide the cert.

    Third option - if the survey is done online from home, when booking the test: The patient has to keep a record of the SID. If he loses it he’ll have to redo the survey and get a new SID. Then he does the test. When the result is ready an email is sent with the SLC. Follow the link in the email (for example it could be www.covidtest.com/results/C) and enter the SID. The clinic links the SID to the test result. The website provides the TLC. The user follows another email link and enters the TLC and the PID. This instructs the clinic to provide the cert.



    Patient ID (PID). This uniquely identifies each patient, but not anything else. It probably already exists as a ‘social security number (SSN)’ or similar. As now, the clinic attaches this number to each patient’s result, so the clinic does know everyone’s result. This proposal does not change that - the goal here is not to make test results anonymous - just the survey results.

    Three letter code (TLC) is the code used to prove the patient has done the survey. It is used to instruct the clinic provide the cert. There are 10 new ones generated each day, and randomly assigned to patients. Then don’t uniquely identify a patient or a result.

    The survey ID number (SID) is unique to that survey - to a particular test of a particular person. It is attached to the survey and kept by the clinic and a copy of the number is kept by the patient. But the clinic cannot link the survey ID to a patient.

    The single letter code (SLC) is the same for everyone with the same result on the same day. It changes every day. One day, it might be ‘E’ for all the positive results and ‘H’ for all the negative results. But the next day it will change to two other random letters. Anyone can check that this does not uniquely identify the patient. It must be decoded to reveal the test result and demand the certificate to be provided.

  • @yxzi
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    13 years ago

    Dunno why nobody has commented on that so far, but my best guess is a lack of legitimation for disclosing this kind of personal information. Then again, in case your location is tracked anyway, certain correlations like you suggested could be deduced, but finding an actual 1:1 correlation should prove difficult

    • @roastpotatothiefOP
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      13 years ago

      In contact tracing, you are asked to give up a lot of personal information. That’s why it doesn’t work - people can’t be honest about their high risk activities, because it’s not anonymous.

      This idea is an anonymous survey, for that reason. No personal information is gathered, but rich statistical information is gathered.

      But how can you link each questionaire answer to either a positive or negative test, without identifying the individual? The technicalities would take some take to write out. Just know I’ve thought about it and there is (at least one) good way of doing it.