The Golden Rule for Reopening the Economy: BETTER Data, not PERFECT Data
We need a simple, safe, and privacy-preserving link to test results.
Businesses and communities everywhere are struggling to safely and effectively reopen following the lockdowns and social distancing policies triggered by the COVID 19 pandemic. The only way to make this happen is to provide as much meaningful, relevant, and actionable data as possible to decision makers on the ground. Any data is better than no data when trying to make reopening decisions.
Reopening: The Gold Standard.
As many organizations in our society are struggling to survive, the conversation has turned to reopening. Everybody wants to do it, but there is little clarity and guidance about how to achieve it safely. And the closer one gets to the practical circumstances, the more nebulous and confusing things get.
The Golden Rule for reopening has to be to give decision makers the data they need to make a better informed decision on the ground. This is when they are confronted with another person entering an office, store, library, restaurant, public transportation, or during any kind of meeting or event. They don’t need perfect information, but more, better, and continuously improving information.
Counting the Dead and the Sick.
Right now, authorities are counting the dead and the sick. These general numbers, by city, state, or even the whole country, drive general policy guidelines and decisions about lockdowns and opening the economy. From 30,000 feet it makes sense. But on the ground it leaves the individual decision makers in offices, stores, restaurants, campuses, or churches with little to go on.
To introduce some data and evidence-driven rationale, many focus on measuring symptoms of employees, by taking their temperature, or conducting diagnostic tests. In the meantime, many health services providers and authorities push for contact tracing. Antibody tests are said to be not good “enough” — without quantifying what “enough” really means when the alternatives are (a) a complete lack of data, (b) largely meaningless and similarly unreliable data via diagnostic testing or symptom self-reporting, and (c) data not available until days after the encounter via contact tracing.
The inconvenient truth is that all the above measures fall short of the Golden Rule. They rarely help, because most relevant data is not available to decision makers when they encounter a specific person at a specific situation and specific point in time. But at that moment they have to decide whether, to what degree, and how, they can let this person interact with employees, customers, or the general public.
Measuring symptoms says relatively little about a person being infectious. Many infected are asymptomatic. Even if they weren’t, the estimated incubation period of about two weeks is way too long to allow for a meaningful assessment of the individual person standing in front of us.
Diagnostic tests, also called virus tests, can confirm whether a person is sick at the moment when the test is performed. This is better than measuring a person’s temperature. But it does not say much, or in many circumstances anything, about the person standing in front of us after they took the test. Even if a diagnostic test has proven that you did not have the virus yesterday, there is no guarantee that you haven’t contracted the virus since then.
Contact tracing does not tell a business owner either whether a person is infectious, sick, or safe to be around. It just can identify who somebody has been in touch with. Then, this information can be used to trigger — testing or social distancing.
In the absence of symptoms or a proven acute infection, data gained through Antibody tests says something immediately and directly relevant about the person standing in front of you. It says whether a test has detected Antibodies. This data is not perfect. Like with diagnostic testing, procedure and methods matter, and it also has false positives and false negatives. But overall, it still renders specific information relating to the person in front of me. If a test suggests with 95% probability (or 75% or 99.9%, however reliable the test is) that a person has Antibodies, this is meaningful and actionable. It also is better than not having that information.
Practically, it means that I now can make an informed decision about letting you into an office, store, restaurant, or meeting. I do not have 100% reliable information. But I now know more about you than before, and I can take a calculated risk — or not.
The Missing Link.
Our currently biggest challenge is that we must have a link which makes test data available to anybody who has to make exactly that critical call: Do I need to practice social distancing around the person I encounter (“protect” them and others) and, likewise, is being physically close to that person safe for me, my employees, my customers, or the general public. In the past, we had no simple, safe, and privacy-preserving way of making test data available in the specific situation where it aids decision-making about opening or not.
Now, though, we can do that with a simple smartphone based app and platform, called Heal ID. It gives decision makers in businesses and across society access to fully anonymous but highly relevant test results when and where they need it. With a simple scan of a barcode, Heal ID lets anyone determine whether any person’s Covid-19 test results (including Antibody test results) meet an acceptable threshold so that this person can be considered to be safe around. Organizations can independently determine these thresholds, and automatically adjust them to consider newly published scientific findings.
Heal ID is completely privacy-centric. Specific data is only accessible by the individual user. At no point in the process does it disclose a person’s identity. It does not collect or share people’s specific personal or medical data with anybody, including the company itself. To ensure this, it uses advanced encryption concepts and methods, and a distributed and decentralized database.
Applying the Golden Rule
Without a solution like Heal ID, businesses and community leaders will need to continue basing their specific reopening decisions on guesswork. Independent of what any general data suggests, they have no way of knowing whether any of the people they and their employees and customers interact with are healthy or sick, infectious or safe to be around.
Heal ID empowers decision makers. It is the missing link that makes reopening practical. While safeguarding the privacy of people and protecting their medical information, they give relevant information to those that need it — instantaneously, and where and when they need it.
By applying this Golden Rule of Reopening, it is the only such solution available today.
