How is it different to other apps?

Regain Control virtual vaccine
1

QUESTION

Lady Deakin asked:
how yours differs

ANSWER

While we do have a web app called Personal Map which can be downloaded, Virtual Vaccine is not an app.

The biggest advantage of Virtual Vaccine over others is the benefit of hindsight. We have the luxury of learning from other contact tracing mobile apps.

Although we have looked at using our community information ecosystem to control covid, we only started getting serious after Alan Finkel's National Contact Tracing Review, when we saw:

Further, we recommend no more than 48 hours in total from the time a test sample is first taken to the point at which close contacts of a confirmed case are notified to quarantine. Advice to us is that if this turnaround time is achieved, we can substantially reduce community transmission.

And thought what if we can push it down to ZERO hour ?

That is, the system is smart enough to notify high risk close contacts BEFORE the test result is out - in fact even when the citizen is driving to a test centre or waiting in a queue for the actual test.

The resulting technology will probably be useful for something else too.

We cannot use pinpoint solutions like mobile contact tracing apps which are not working well anyway for something so advanced, we need to build a holistic complete end-to-end ecosystem (for the speed) that is citizen driven (for the privacy) with everything, from pragmatic incentives to testing queue lengths to quarantine durations.

None of the current contact tracing approaches are holistic - even if there is a high uptake of an app the quality of the outcome may still be poor.

For example, just because people have download the COVIDSafe app, it does NOT mean they are willing to share. In Victoria, out of 20,000+ cases ONLY 1842+ have agreed to share.

Virtual Vaccine encourages sharing as well as collecting, so useful data can be delivered at the end.

  1. Control Advantage
    People get scared if asked to share some encrypted data collected about themselves which they do not know what was actually collected nor how much was collected. Also no control of the data, as the upload is an all or nothing proposition. With virtual vaccine they can control their identities, see the data and remove the data if they like.

  2. Anonymous Advantage
    Unlike COVIDSafe, Virtual Vaccine does NOT required any identifying information like mobile numbers or postcode, so the user really is anonymous. We have special privacy protected ways to alert user of a potential exposure.

  3. Usefulness Advantage
    COVIDSafe is a one trick pony, with Virtual Vaccine the location data collected by the user is the user's own information asset can be used in almost an unlimited number of areas outside of covid.

Some details on difference between virtual vaccine and traditional contact tracing are list here:
https://web.contacttrace.com.au/#improvingcontacttracing