My 2 cents
What is problematic in the western world that human and privacy rights have been not thought through properly. It's legacy foundations and scaffolding with very different colors and forms of elements. It's a mess with generalistic concepts and outdated theories.
Nobody (and I actually mean a body consisting of multiple ppl) has looked at it from all angles. Govs/regulatory bodies usually look at it from 1 angle, solve/scaffold that and don't care about the overall picture.
An example. Schools would need to know:
- why someone is off sick (check, parents mostly say when calling it)*
- They need confirmation from PHE/Testing facility that pupilA is booked in for a test
- Need to know result of the test
- Other close contacts and/or schools involved (through siblings) need to be alerted.
*let's disregard the "won't say it might be covid, so I won't have to test, and won't have to isolate" scenario and assume that each individual is socially responsible. We know it's not true, but for this example let's go with it.
Here is a very small piece of the data puzzle.
Parent to school: 1. kid is sick, suspected covid - yes/no
if yes:
|| school to PHE/LA test team
|| identify close contacts and send list to PHE in || with notifying identified parents
has pupil or parent booked a test? yes/no {not possible because of privacy rights}
If no: PHE/test team book an appointment for them and notify
Test done: yes/no
Test result: positive/negative
if [both]: notify school AND parent AND identified contacts {not possible because of privacy rights It's up to the parent to notify the school about test results, at least in our school's policy}
if +; to parent: notification + date of next booked test + helpline numbers + legal requirements in a few lines (what you need to do exactly - parents to stay home until x, siblings go/nogo to school, etc)
AND
option for asking for help (shopping, whatever, bring 2 puzzles because we are bored*)
Half of these measures are not doable atm because of privacy measures. BUT if we think on a personal level: most people have google or apple services. These track you unless you specifically opt out, and hardly anyone does. These send you notification and know where you've been, even sometimes who you were in contact with.
On an individual level we are happy to have amazon, google, apple collect millions of data points of us for commercial and profit reasons, but when it comes to gov wanting to share and access data points about us between gov agencies for public health reasons we are all up in arms.
As much as people are against centralised control there is a huge and genuine need to collect and record data on covid and share these between agencies.
Plus I'd love to see all data being available in a fekking huge, openly accessible, anonymized datalake for everyone to use. For research.
*I am pretty sure that there would be a base of charities and volunteers that could do this btw