Virtual Vaccine

Making COVID19 our LAST pandemic

1. Introduction

Apple and Google could have ended the whole pandemic within weeks using the data on people's phones, months before vaccine availability. If the Cloud can control how you think, it certainly knows whether you have been exposed.

Due to privacy concerns, instead of processing the massive amount of data they collect daily, Apple and Google developed a standard to collect MINIMUM data (e.g. only a bluetooth identifier) for GOVERNMENTS to process centrally in a few data centres. Like other Covid apps, it fails to make meaningful impact on the pandemic as case numbers soar.

Vaccines are not perfect, Virtual Vaccine protects the population when Real Vaccines fail to do so (e.g. sustained high death rates from new variants worldwide).

Virtual Vaccine takes the opposite approach to privacy protection by collecting MAXIMUM data for CITIZENS to process themselves on millions of mobile phones. It revolutionise infectious disease control by aggregating citizen compute power and stored data to deliver breakthrough capabilities:

  1. Accuracy
    Locate virus precisely down to METRES.
    Reduce inconvenienced population from thousands to dozens with Data Fusion
    No more collateral damage - less testing - less isolation.

  2. Speed
    Notify each other anonymously in REAL-TIME.
    Reduce contact tracing times from days to minutes with Continuous Tracing
    No more delayed alerts - less deaths - less variants.

  3. Ease of Use
    Deploy instantly with just ONE CLICK.
    Control everything with web browser on all devices with Personal Console
    No registration - No technical skill needed

  4. Privacy
    Analyse citizen data privately on their OWN DEVICES.
    Contribute insights instead of raw data with Citizen Application
    No more disclosing of data - more control - more

  5. Scalability
    Manage outbreaks of ANY SIZE.
    Process increasing cases seamlessly with Crowd Infrastructure
    No more overwhelmed systems - unlimited capacity - low cost

  6. Coverage
    Protect vulnerable communities and sites WORLDWIDE.
    Cross border situation aware distancing with Forward Quarantine
    Less need for locking up in hotels - less risk when entering nursing homes

  7. Incentive
    Leverage collected data to generate INCOME.
    Compensates contributions fairly in a tangible manner with Retrospective Reward
    No government funding required - Support non-COVID applications

Virtual Vaccine can be deployed with ONE CLICK on mobile phones worldwide, any virus can be isolated quickly before the availability of vaccine - pandemic will be a thing of the past.

2. Vaccine Problems Fixed

Virtual Vaccine and Real Vaccine operate at the OPPOSITE ENDS of the visibility spectrums.

Real Vaccine does not know where the virus is, so needs to jab everyone.
Virtual Vaccine knows exactly where the virus is, so needs to notify just a few.

Virtual Vaccine gives citizens and their governments a NEW OPTION, an alternative to vaccines that will protect us from COVID and other infectious diseases.

Virtual Vaccine solves the Personal Privacy vs Virus Visibility conundrum by giving citizens the capability and incentive to collect and process data privately on their own devices instead of sending their data away to remote Cloud Computing facilities for processing.

2.1. Stop Ongoing Carnage

No matter how "high" is the vaccination rate, large numbers of people are still dying of COVID in 2023 and many are getting Long COVIDs.

  • 4.5% of ALL deaths in United Kingdom are STILL caused by COVID week ending 2023-03-17.
  • Australian homicides (0.7 deaths a day) and road deaths (3.1 deaths a day) are often on the news, yet who is reporting that there are STILL an average of 25 deaths a day (on 2023-05-26) despite rolling out of a nationwide 4-shot vaccination program.

For some the COVID damage is long lasting e.g. 2 million LONG COVID cases in in United Kingdom so far 22-06-02. Also each new reinfection has an accumulative damage effect to the body.

Beside preventing hospitalisations and deaths, Virtual Vaccine can also stop nationwide productivity lost and reduced economic activity that come with mass infection of the population as each new variant driven wave arrives.

WHY OFFER UNNECESSARY SACRIFICES TO COVID?

Protecting BOTH the vulnerable AND the economy is now possible at NO cost to the taxpayers.

WIth Virtual Vaccine, there is now NO excuse for leaving anyone behind.

Above Photo "Birthday" by Brais Lorenzo Couto - Siena Awards 2021, taken during celebration of the birthday of Elena Pérez, 98, in a nursing home in Ourense, Spain, two weeks after she survived COVID.

2.2. Complements Real Vaccines

At increasing COVID infections worldwide despite high vaccination rates, Virtual Vaccine is required to address numerous weaknesses real vaccination programs.

Major Real Vaccine problems solved by Virtual Vaccine include:

  1. Short Protection Duration - CNBC 2021-12-08
    Virtual Vaccine works as long as you want it to work, no need for any "booster" after only 4 months.

  2. Continued Vaccine Hesitancy - Forbes 2021-12-27
    Virtual Vaccine protects both those that have been vaccinated and those that have NOT.

  3. Difficult Negotiation - Pharmaceutical Tech 2021-02-23
    The power of Virtual Vaccine comes from millions of citizens as opposite to a few pharmaceutical companies - no more one sided negotiation.

  4. Slow Vaccine Deployment - Nature 2020-12-18
    Virtual Vaccine can handle new virus and variants within days without months of new development, no low temperature transports, no injection queues, no new government approvals required - just one click for instant update.

  5. Expensive Vaccine Deployment - Australia Health 2021-12-14
    Virtual Vaccine can generate income for citizens using the latent value of their data to offset any of their costs associated with fighting COVID - yes - it is virtually free.

  6. Less Effective against Long COVID - Nature 2021-11-23
    Virtual Vaccine avoids initial infection thus also prevents Long COVID which can affect 1 in 3 patients.

  7. Potential Health Risk - TGA Australia 2021-12-23
    Virtual Vaccine is NOT injected into the body, just installed on the mobile phone and can be removed at anytime.

  8. Frequent Boosters Warning on Immune Response - Bloomberg 2022-01-12
    With Virtual Vaccine the more frequent data points are collected, the more insight and income the citizen gain.

  9. High Breakthrough Percentages - Minnesota Health 2021-12-27
    Virtual Vaccine operates independent of real vaccine design and physiology of individuals, thus preventing on-going transmissions, severe illnesses, long covid and deaths in breakthrough cases.

  10. Dangerous Variants from Selective Pressure - CNN 2021-07-03
    Virtual Vaccine does NOT encourage new vaccine resistant variants by providing asymptomatic environments for their evolution.

3. Privacy vs Trust Dilemma Solved

Perfect visibility into virus locations and instant alerts to relevant parties, will stop ANY outbreak.

Virtual Vaccine does just that - by solving the Virus Visibility vs Personal Privacy conundrum with our WORLD FIRST deployment of homomorphic encryption at scale.

Traditionally it is not possible to have both absolute privacy and perfect visibility since personal data will be exposed to external parties, giving them detailed knowledge of everyone's movements (in order to discover close contacts) and their identities (in order to notify them).

Unlike private companies which are profiting from people's data with impunity, governments need to protect the privacy of their citizens (and themselves), so massive centralised real-time location logging cannot be used in the fight with COVID-19.

This lack of instant, accurate and complete visibility into virus movements means

  1. Population wide testing and lock down - resulting in massive collateral damages
  2. High contact tracing workload - system easily overwhelmed as cases increases
  3. Excessive sharing of citizen data - credit card purchases, mobile towers used etc.

If the citizens can provide complete visibility into their movements by tracking THEMSELVES (instead of being tracked by someone else), then most of the privacy concerns will disappear!

3.1. Citizen Application

With Virtual Vaccine, citizens process their own DATA on their mobile phones privately, providing others with the resulting INSIGHTS instead of exposing raw data.

With just ONE CLICK citizens receive compute power to process their private data on their mobile phones themselves, eliminating the need to send their data away to remote compute power for processing.

By giving out only INSIGHTS and keeping their raw DATA to themselves, citizens have full control and absolute privacy. Citizens build up permanently information assets of their own (instead of sending data away to build up the Cloud's assets).

Even incidents like the BBQ Man Leak, where the identity was not disclosed directly but inferred, can be prevented. Instead of raw data (e.g. business names like Barbeques Galore) only homomorphically encrypted identities, locations and times are processed on fuzzy blockchains.

This positive feedback loop of more data, more insight, more reward means unlike other COVID programs, not only can Virtual Vaccine operate WITHOUT draining taxpayer funds, it can actually boost a nation's economy by transforming every citizen from a passive USER of cloud platform assets into an active OWNER of information assets.

Beside providing Citizen Insight (which Virtual Vaccine is an example), Citizen Applications can also be used to provide Citizen Identity and Citizen Resource.

3.2. Crowd Infrastructure

No matter how good are the surveillance technologies or how powerful are the computers, exponentially increasing Covid cases is going to overwhelm ANY government contact tracing systems, resulting in the need to put on damaging restrictions and lockdowns.

Virus mutation does not stop when government contact tracing systems are swamped and shut down, Virtual Vaccine is there to fill the void with a substantially more effective system.

Virtual Vaccine is the only pandemic solution that can take advantage of the enormous computing power and detailed private data on the mobile phones of the whole population. As an outbreak affects more people, more mobile phones are brought in fight it.

By hunting the virus down precisely and isolating it rapidly at zero costs. Short vaccine protection duration and new variants are no longer of concern even as restrictions ease.

3.3. Personal Console

Virtual Vaccine allows EVERYONE, independent of their wealth or skill, to participate - with just one click.

Virtual Vaccine is available for trial now. Just go to 88.io and you will be redirect to the closest server to you (e.g. app.contacttrace.com.au)
where Virtual Vaccine will then be installed into your web browser.

  • NO download from App Stores or Play Store
  • NO sign-up to any service or create any account
  • NO advertisement or any unsolicited interruption
  • NO leaking of data outside of your phone
  • NO username, email, phone number etc. needed
  • NO charge for use, distribution, modification (refer to license)
  • NO hidden operation (source code is published publicly)

Once installed it will ask permission to access your location, like any other data collected by Virtual Vaccine, the location data collected is used to display your location on your phone to you only.

Virtual Vaccine is operated through a user friendly map interface on your browser. You simply place location pins on the map (manually or automatically) as you move around. Information are then attached to each of those pins.

When there is an existing outbreak, it only takes one to two weeks of using Virtual Vaccine in MANUAL MODE (where everyone scans every QR code they can find e.g. on back of bus seats to inside elevators) to flush all existing viruses out to a high degree of accuracy and then they can relax and go back to using Virtual Vaccine in AUTOMATIC MODE with just wireless signals (e.g. bluetooth to wifi) providing adequate accuracy to control any future outbreaks.

Fighting COVID surgically WITHOUT blunt instruments like lock downs and border closures by exposing the virus precisely and cutting its legs off rapidly is now easy!

3.4. Data Fusion

Instead of gathering information a few minutes a day through a SINGLE app's QR codes and Bluetooth signals in one country, Virtual Vaccine has built in QR scanner and Bluetooth detector to capture information 24 hours a day from ANY COVID app's QR codes and ANY Bluetooth signal across ALL countries.

Virtual Vaccine also collects non-COVID specific codes and signals into the citizen's mobile phone, so the data can all be fused together to create a high resolution picture of the citizen's movement.

From scanning Alipay and Wechat QR codes in retail shops to logging bluetooth signal strengths from nearby earbuds to calling in by phone to tell us your location (+61499331111), every bit of data is used to reduce the collateral damage (unnecessary testing, isolation etc.) to people who are NOWHERE near potentially infectious cases.

Citizens contribute enough processing power to fuse all sorts of data e.g. example manual "Touch Pin" clicking to specify accurate location indoors and Personal QR code scanning to specify meeting indoors. Even NEGATIVE test results (if you have been living with people for the pass 7 days and they all just have negative test results then your chance of being infected is lowered even if you have not been tested yet) can be useful.

Virtual Vaccine collects everything, from barcodes of your rapid antigen tests to the wifi signals of your neighbour, so maximum amount of data can be brought to bear on COVID.

Data Fusion provides unprecedented situation awareness, reducing lockdown population from THOUSANDS to DOZENS by locating the virus precisely down to metres. Ubiquitous data collection and analysis enable resources to be allocated properly e.g. preventing long quarantine, testing and vaccination queues.

3.5. Continuous Tracing

Instead of waiting for the test result, Virtual Vaccine starts contact tracing using citizen computing resources when a person first has concerns, tracing is well underway BEFORE the person has even arrived at a centre to get tested.

Some people might not want to be identified to others that they have been tested positive, they have not been vaccinated etc. yet they do want to warn others.

High risk people (aged care workers, family members etc.) can choose to receive Early Notifications, warning them to take care BEFORE the test result is out.

Virtual Vaccine can perform the bulk of the contact tracing workload automatically and anonymously, freeing up human contact tracer to supervise its operation and handle difficult cases.

Virtual Vaccine is the world's first to reduce the recommended contact tracing time in Dr Alan Finkel's National Contact Tracing Review from 2 DAYS down to 2 MINUTES.

3.6. Forward Quarantine

Besides earlier notification than any other contact tracing systems, Virtual Vaccine also provide wider coverage than any other contact tracing system.

Your data now follows you instead of the government, so sharing of data no longer needs to be confined to one country - allowing seamless crossing of borders.

Forward Quarantine enables buildings, campuses, districts, states, countries to set up their own customised quarantine programs easily, without the overheads of special accommodation and staff.

Whether it is a remote town or a nursing home, Forward Quarantine enables virus free areas to be created rapidly. When the situation warrants, some of these virus free areas can be expanded or joined together.

All contact tracing systems are fragmented across different governments making it difficult to get a complete risk profile of visitors or notify close contacts once a positive case has crossed the border.

Personal Quarantine stores all data with the visitor instead of governments, generating up-to-date and trusted insights for different authorities as required - entering nursing homes, boarding planes, crossing borders etc.

Virtual Vaccine automatically detect the change in jurisdiction down to local government level in real-time (as displayed below), giving you information on local laws and update you on local risks.

3.7. Retrospective Reward

Unlike other COVID interventions, Virtual Vaccine helps build a nation's economy, instead of obliterate it (e.g. city lockdowns) or drain it (e.g. constant vaccinations).

In traditional contact trace systems, the collected data need to be deleted by law after a certain time, but with Virtual Vaccine the SAME raw data used to provide insights to Virtual Vaccine can be used to provide other insights to other applications in the future.

In addition to stopping pandemics, the same citizen infrastructure with the unique abilities of solving the privacy, cost and easiness problems ALL AT THE SAME TIME can be used in an unlimited number of projects large and small.

Virtual Vaccine that overcomes ALL hurdles limiting citizen contributions in data centric community projects.

Using the same mobile, wifi and bluetooth signals collected to locate COVID, citizens can starting building a sovereign terrestrial indoor capable geo-positioning system for their own country - no satellites nor rockets needed!

Beside grandiose national projects, a world where personal privacy and community visibility can not just coexist, but work together in a synergistic way, is transformative at every level.

With Virtual Vaccine citizens are offering insights to each other in a privacy preserving way to fight COVID. The same technology can be used to offer insights in many other areas.

Use the same QR code check-in for COVID to give invaluable statistics to your local cafe - it will not know who you are but it will know when the first customer arrived, when the last one left, when it was the busiest etc. In fact if it has bluetooth or wifi installed, you might NOT even need to scan, just share those events with the cafe and walk in and out without stopping!

The built-in barcode scanner is not just good at registering the rapid antigen test kit you used, it can also scan the barcode on the bottle of the milk you drank - in both cases you have a chance of selling data to the manufacturers.

From getting out of the way of emergency vehicles in real-time, to finding a person missing from a week ago, from passing on a whole lifetime's digit assets to strangers, to knowing whether that handsome man online is telling the truth ... the possibilities are endless.

4. Preventing other diseases

Besides COVID-19, other infectious diseases also kill hundreds of thousands of people each year (e.g. influenza).

Instead of collaborating with specialist researchers in forecasting influenza, with Virtual Vaccine health departments can now collaborate with the general population in preventing influenza.

5. Conclusion

Virtual Vaccine applies the revolutionary Private Cyberspace technology to solve one of the toughness problems facing humankind.

As a non-pharmaceutical solution Virtual Vaccine fixes many of real vaccine's problems, its built-in reward system enables anyone from any country to contribute and benefit from their data and effort.

Virtual Vaccine is already multilingual capable and is available inside all Private Cyberspaces, which you can install on your mobile phone with just ONE CLICK. Try out the ONE SECOND quick start after installation!

In light of real vaccine's poor performance in preventing infections, especially against continuously evolving variants (e.g. BA.5 and B1.2.75), a Living with COVID strategy is not only deadly for some, damaging for most, it is also very expensive for ALL.

Now that it has been PROVEN that COVID is evolving faster than real vaccine's ability to stop mass infections, continuously draining taxpayer funds for "never ending" number of low effectiveness jabs does not make economical nor moral sense.

Virtual Vaccine enables governments and citizens to work seamlessly TOGETHER fighting COVID surgically, WITHOUT blunt instruments like lockdowns. It brings unprecedented human and computer resources of the whole population into the fight, isolating COVID with privacy protection with accuracy and speed never possible before.

Real vs Virtual Vaccine

Feature Real Vaccine Virtual Vaccine
Protect Using Immunity Distance
During Vaccination Injection into Body Download onto Phone
After Vaccination Body starts producing Antibodies Phone starts logging Locations
The More The Better Antibodies created Locations logged
Trigger Infection Outbreak
Detector Antibodies Risk Analysis
Action T-cells Face Masks

Real Vaccine Problems

Excess Deaths

The correlation between Australian Excess Deaths by State and Booster Vaccinations

All contact tracing worldwide FAILED to contain COVID-19. Virtual Vaccine uses citizen compute for contact tracing protecting privacy and ensuring that it can never be overwhelmed no matter how many cases.

Every contact tracing system worldwide FAILED to contain COVID-19. Virtual Vaccine uses citizen synergy for contact tracing protecting privacy and ensuring that it can never be overwhelmed no matter how many cases.

Complementing Vaccine Passports

With different vaccine effectiveness against different variants for different durations, Citizen Assisted Contact Tracing is needed as a catch all safety net complementing Vaccination Passports.

Forward Quaratine

Forward Quarantine is an OPTIONAL step in Virtual Vaccine, it is useful when a community wants to purse the Virus Elimination by blocking virus entering into its territory in a privacy protected, low cost and low friction way.

Forward Quarantine substantially reduces the burden of traditional COVID quarantine systems by providing:

  1. much greater visibility into an individual's risk of carrying the virus before and after crossing the border.
  2. much faster and wider notification should the risk assessment change due to availability of new information.

Due to its ease of implementation, it can scale all the way down from a country to a state to a district to a campus to an individual building.

Forward Quarantine

Instead monitoring and isolating visitors AFTER they have arrived, Personal Quarantine can increase traditional quarantine capacity and reduce risks by FORWARD monitoring and isolating visitors BEFORE they have crossed borders, entered premises, boarded planes.

Substantially reducing quarantine inconveniences and costs.

As a visitor travels across multiple borders, the International Fiduciary Exchange provides a single trusted information source for different governments while protecting the privacy of the traveller. Information sharing problems between governments due to different privacy, health and security laws are substantially reduced.

Local governments can access to massive amounts of data contributed by remote citizens and governments, subject to rules defined by the contributors and enforced by the Fiduciary Exchange. For example, to perform a risk assessment of an incoming visitor on arrival to determine whether hotel isolation, home isolation, offensive monitoring or defensive monitoring is required.

With different vaccine effectiveness against different variants for different durations, Citizen Assisted Contact Tracing can provide a catch all safety net complementing Vaccination Passports.

Citizen Timeline Insights

Depending on the current outbreak situation and the population they want to protect, different areas will have their own unique requirements before allowing visitors entry into their areas. Rules for entering a country town will be very different to rules for entering a nursing home.

With Forward Quarantine, visitors are allowed entry to an area based on insights gained from relevant Citizen Timelines that the visitor and related entities have homomorphically encrypted data stored.

For example, some homomorphically encrypted data on the Citizen Timeline that can be used to gain insight into COVID transmission risk are distance between the 2 parties, duration of contact, whether the contact took place indoor, the number of people tested positive, the density of people there etc.

Area administrators are only given access tokens by the visitor to generate required insights from relevant Citizen Timelines, so the administrators can determine whether visitor behaviour before and after entering the area are acceptable (e.g. no close contact with potential positive cases, avoiding crowded areas, isolating at home, wearing mask etc.). They do NOT knowing what those behaviours actually are.

Remote Home Monitoring

Although Data Fusion already collects a massive number of data points during Continuous Tracing, it is possible to request extra monitoring in order to confirm the accuracy of the locations collected in Continuous Tracing by using Local Marker.

Question 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

Question 2

Direct logging to Private Devices

Question

Isn't it much more private if everyone just log their locations via mobile apps directly into their own private devices (say mobile phones or home servers) without going though Community Processing at all ?

Basically, people run a tracking app on their mobile phones which stores their movements on their phone or send the movements back to their own server at home. No one else will have access to their locations then.

The government would then broadcast the locations of the positive people, which everyone can then download and compare with their own stored movements.

Answer

Totally private systems (where no one else except the owner can see the data) makes the determination of whether a close contact incident very inefficient.

1. Privacy of Positive Cases

To make the matching fast and accurate, people who are positive will need to have ALL their movements during a period downloaded into millions of strangers' private servers.

This is not acceptable to people who are tested positive.

2. High Resource Consumption

Since there is no way of telling before hand who was near the positive person, the movements of the positive person have to be broadcasted to EVERYONE in the country even if they are thousands of kilometers away.

This is a big drain on computing and network resources of everyone.

3. Reliability of Private Devices

Since presence records are coming in real-time all through the day, high quality internet and redundant server is required to prevent losing data. This is beyond the capability of standard NBN and home servers, making direct logging to home servers expensive.

For mobile phones, the need to constantly download the movements

4. Our Data Sharing

With our system's block based design, there is privacy for ALL - whether a person is positive or not.

With our system:

  1. ONLY potentially exposed people (people within the same block) are notified (not everyone).
  2. ONLY blocks (e.g. bounded within 30 minutes and 100 metres), NOT exact times/locations are disclosed potentially exposed people.
  3. Before and After blocks outside the encounter period are NOT disclosed.

5. Our Personal Servers

Our system can make use of low cost personal servers running at home, but only as long term storage for analysis of data.

The real-time data collection is performed by Community Processing modules running in full redundant manner across multiple professionally data centres with high quality internet connection.

Question 3

How does it handle asymptomatic cases?

Question

Lady Deakin asked:
I also wasn’t sure how cases are fed into the system? Does this just rely on people being identified through routine testing if they have symptoms or were found to be a close contact of a case? Post vaccine there may still be some cases, but they will be asymptomatic most likely so its not clear how these would be identified.

Answer

It is ironic that the more real vaccinations occur, the less severe the symptoms, the less chance people will be going to get tested - reducing the ability to detect virus spread.

Virtual Vaccine has a special feature to handle that situation, which will be published here following the completion of the https://web.contacttrace.com.au/virtual-vaccine/anonymous-exchange/ page in a few days' time.

Fight pandemics surgically WITHOUT blunt instruments like lock downs and border closures.

Preemptive Tracing

Instead of waiting for the test result, Citizen Assisted Contact Tracing starts contact tracing using citizen computing resources when a person first has concerns, tracing is well underway BEFORE the person has even arrived at a centre to get tested.

High risk people (aged care workers, family members etc.) can choose to receive Early Notifications, warning them to take care BEFORE the test result is out.

Citizen Assisted Contact Tracing can perform the bulk of the contact tracing workload automatically and anonymously, freeing up human contact tracer to supervise its operation and handle difficult cases.

Reduce Test Queues

Large numbers of COVID-19 transmission can overwhelm any testing capabilities of any nation.

Instead of people randomly standing in the queue for many hours, Virtual Vaccine's complete visibility into variant type and transmission paths means testing can prioritised based on not just the contact distance, duration, environment, vaccination numbers and the types of variant.

Virtual Vaccine Status

Currently Available Statuses for Virtual Vaccine

  1. OK (ok)
  2. symptom started (sym)
  3. symptom ended (sys)
  4. test pending (pen)
  5. pcr positive (ppr)
  6. pcr negative (npr)
  7. antigen positive (pan)
  8. antigen negative (nan)
  9. potential exposure (exp)
  10. returned from travel (tvl)
  11. vaccination pending (vac)
  12. vaccination done (vad)
  13. quarantine started (sqt)
  14. quarantine ended (eqt)

Visibility Spectrum

Working at the opposite ends of the visibility spectrum, Citizen Assisted Contact Tracing (it knows exactly where the virus is, so only need to isolates a few) COMPLEMENTS Vaccination (it does not know where the virus is, so need to jab everyone) by reducing deaths and costs.

Increasing Vaccination Problems

Despite high vaccination rates in some countries, problems caused by COVID-19 continues.

Achieving herd immunity through vaccination alone looks unlikely. Citizen Assisted Contact Tracing can cover up vaccination weaknesses before and after Herd Immunity is reached:

  1. Short Vaccine Protection Durations - NewScientist 2021-12-24 | CNBC 2021-12-08
  2. More Contagious Than Flu - Yale Medicine 2021-08-26
  3. Global Vaccine Shortages - BMJ 2021-10-28 | 9 News 2021-12-15
  4. Stubborn Virus Variants - News Medical 2021-06-29
  5. Imperfect Transmission Prevention - NY Times 2021-08-14
  6. Potential Health Risks - AUS TGA 2021-08-26
  7. Continued Vaccine Hesitancy - Forbes 2021-12-27 | Nature 2021-12-23
  8. Death in Breakthrough Cases - The Guardian 2021-06-27
  9. Long Covid in Breakthrough Cases - medRxiv 2021-07-26
  10. Massive Recurring Costs - NY Times 2021-07-23
  11. Vaccine Increases Variant Selective Pressure - CNN 2021-07-30 | News Medical 2021-12-8

The CDC might NOT have stopped tracking breakthrough cases in May 2021 if it knew of data centric solutions like Citizen Assisted Contact Tracing which need every bit of data on each vaccine to calculate risks in every encounter.

Current COVID case surges in highly vaccinated countries like USA and those in Europe confirms the unique contributions that non-pharmaceutical interventions like Citizen Assisted Contact Tracing (which protects the citizen before the virus has entered the body) can make.

Government Mobile Apps

Continuous outbreaks worldwide have demonstrated that government Bluetooth and QR Code based contact tracing solutions, just do NOT bring enough real-world fire power to the fight with COVID-19.

Besides hunting down and cutting the legs off COVID-19 better than another other platforms, Virtual Vaccine brings a side benefit that no other platform can provide:
Growing the country's economy substantially by massive deployment of computing power into people's hands - transferring innovation and profits from the overseas few to the local masses.

Bluetooth Problems

Bluetooth dominates the contact tracing mobile apps deployed by most governments:

Unfortunately bluetooth is turning out to be an increasingly poor choice.

Note:

Bluetooth solutions are not contact tracing solution, they are notification solution.
There is no tracking, it does not go further than the direct contact, it stops just when the real tracing work starts!

No Location Data

A fundemantal problem with bluetooth based plaform is that it is NOT location aware.

Using a tracing solution without location information is like fighing fire with a spoon when a fire host is needed. The danger now is the tendency to exclude other solutions (like the use of a fire host) since you already have a spoon in your hand.

Bluetooth promises contact tracing while preserving privacy, but without location information, it becomes a distraction to front-line contact tracers.

The limited information provided by bluetooth contact tracing platforms is just NOT good enough in handling a virus as stealthy as COVID-19 virus.

No Aerosol and Surface Tracing

Bluetooth CANNOT trace surface transmission NOR airborne transmission.

Different studies have now shown that COVID-19 virus can be airborne for hours e.g.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2004973
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/26/14857

Bluetooth contact tracing is only a few months old, but it is no longer in line with new findings.

contacttrace.com.au addresses surface transmission e.g. seats on a bus and confined space transmission e.g. lifts.

No Data Editing

The most popular Bluetooth implementation Google Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) which Australia's new COVIDTrace app is based on, exposes the WHOLE time period of the people diagnosed with COVID-19.

This can be significant barrier to adoption since most people might want the ability to remove some parts of the day from upload - even though they will NEVER do so.

Actually, another Bluetooth protocol DP-3T (which GAEN is somewhat based on) does offers ability for people to remove certain time periods BEFORE uploading to the government, but seriously, who is going to know what to remove if they cannot remember what they were doing or where they were WITHOUT prompting wih location information ?

Anyway editing is an important feature that GAEN has left out.

contacttrace.com.au ALLOWS user editing of data, releasing only the time and location they want.

Fundemental Problems

Ironically one of the best place see how many different attack vectors there are in the bluetooth proximity tracing is in a white paper on DP3T (which GAEN is roughly based on):

The massive effort in trying to secure something that keeps broadcasting its unique keys to the world all the time and then have the infected person's unique keys download by millions of others does not seemed worthwhile given the poor quality of the information we are getting out of it:

Is Google Serious ?

The whole point of using Bluetooth is to remove the need of location tracking, Google Apple made big annoucement on GAEN about just that point and then it turned out that Google needs Location tracking to be turned on before Bluetooth will work.

When Location data is constantly being leaked, what is the purpose of using Bluetooth instead of Location feature on the phone then ?

Since Google and Apple controls the operation of their phones, they can track everyone in the world using their phones down to a few meters - even without their consent right now.

contacttrace.com.au can used use WITHOUT GPS nor Bluetooth turned on, although it can alsouse GPS for those user who like constant tracking of their location -

Dodgy Intentions

This

Maps app is sending so much stuff their

iOS and Android Hacked

Your daily movement is one of your most private information, storing long term data on your phone which you use daily for interaction does not make sense.

Being a portable device, the phone has been taken "home" and taken apart by hackers in details that no other computer server has been exposed to. Unlike web servers inside the data centres, hackers can bring a mobile phone home and hack it 24 hours a day.

It is a fundamenally more exposed platform not just because hackers have total access to complete hardware but also because of exposure in software distribution, as the mobile app software has to travel to outside parties like Apple App Store or Google Play before being distributed to end users. There are just too many attack vectors compared to software running on a locked up computer system. As the primary device you used for interaction with the world there are just too many changing attack vectors everyday to make it secure. You visit some many different web sites each day and there are some many apps on your phone that keep geting updating themselves all the time, every single one of those actions adds to the risk of exposing your data.

Mobile phone insecurities has been confirmed with Vault 7 leaks by Joshua Schulte:

As can be seen in the leaks, once iOS and Android has been broken into, no app running on phone is safe (even so called encryption apps like Whatsapp, Signal, Facebook etc. are all in trouble) since they rely on the operating system to pass unencrypted text to them.

No Statistics

Bluetooth requires many device and environmental parameters between 2 phones to be compatiable in order to be effective.

Device wise things like hardware, operating system, bluetooth stack, power saving modes, software app versions etc. ALL have to be compatible.

Environment wise things like distance, duration, blockage, interference etc. ALL have to be compatible.

The problem is with the decentralised nature of GAEN, it impossible to measure how effective it is.

contacttrace.com.au has 5 different location collection interface from QR code to GPS to voice allow people of any age and phones of any type to participate.

Doubtful Security

Apple Google

Kneejerk Reaction

GAEN came about because bluetooth contact tracing apps do not run well on iOS and Android.

Not because

The whole using bluetooth idea

Zero Research

Commerical Interest

Deploying a government funded program for the public good on a commercial platform full of domineering self-interest is a bit of a mismatch.

If you don't want to dig through their treatment of app developers in the past, just look at the Fortnite case that is happening right now.

Slow Innovation

We are learning new things about COVID-19 everyday, we need to adjust our stratreact fast, governments have to react fast.

Crazy Approval Process

Dodgy Intentions

tracks everyone

QR Code Problems

Competitive Advantages

Forty-Six major advantages over ALL other contact tracing platforms worldwide:

Higher Participation

  1. Customisable privacy allows even the MOST private person to participate
  2. Multiple inputs enables phones WITHOUT bluetooth nor camera to participate
  3. NO need to install any mobile apps
  4. MULTIPLE Languages (initially English, Chinese, Arabic)
  5. VOICE interface for people who cannot see or operate the small phone screens

More Accurate

  1. Trace down to a SINGLE seat - bus, train, stadium, cinema
  2. Timing resolution down to the MINUTE
  3. GPS Signal and QR Code cross checking

Faster Notification

  1. NO waiting for polling cycle - instant notifications via sms and voice
  2. NO blind downloading by millions of phones - data traffic to affected users only
  3. AUTOMATIC phone and email notification of close contacts within minutes
  4. Early warning of close contact BEFORE covid-19 test result is out - tunable for users (e.g. those in health and age care) who do not mind some false positives

Deeper Insight

  1. Physical structure AWARE - air conditioning returns, lifts, rooms
  2. Users can contribute detailed data point that are MONTHS old
  3. Log METADATA like mask wearing, room crowding with each data point

More Economical

  1. Citizens gain ability to SELL their data to commercial enterprises
  2. Government REDUCES tracing and notification resources substantially
  3. Distributed design enable low cost SCALING up gradually as user increase
  4. Crowd-owned server architecture mean citizens take the storage and processing costs OFF the government
  5. Same contact tracing APPLICATION can be used for general tracking kids, seniors, staff without modifications
  6. Same distributed INFRASTRUCTURE can be used for other citizen applications (where citizens have private data store at home but government still have access to big data analytics on parts of those data) e.g. health

Faster Improvements

  1. NO need for Apple or Google approvals to deploy new features
  2. NO need for million of users to update their mobile apps to fix bugs
  3. State based deployment allows easy integration with State laws e.g. ALREADY implemented mandatory visitor registrations in some NSW venues
  4. INTERGRATION with centralised bluetooth systems possible (e.g. COVIDSafe), no time to investigate distributed bluetooth system (e.g. COVIDTrace)

Extra Mapping Interface

  1. Violations WARNINGS - less than 2 metres distancing, less than 1 per 4 square metres , no masks, quarantine escapes
  2. Long QUEUES indicators - virus testing, emergency departments, restaurants
  3. RECENT transmission events - 24 hours, 48 hours, 7 days

Better Security

  1. Built-in web scanner renders malicious QR codes USELESS
  2. Innovative progressive login technology allows secure and rapid ONE click password-less access
  3. Separation of system into MUTUALLY checking non-trusting processing units - servers run by different entities with built in monitoring of each other.
  4. Each transaction cut up and spread across as DIFFERENT processing units
  5. Processing units are prevented from processing data of the same user continuously or too often
  6. Separation of identity and location - no processing unit gets both
  7. Separation of keys and data - key holders have no data, they only release keys to relevant parts of data
  8. Separation of computing and network - computer always hosted on someone else's site
  9. Separation of processing and storage - processors only have access to data for a limited time, long term storage always with owner of data
  10. Data storage monitored independently to ensure processing units delete the data after processing
  11. Network traffic monitored independently to ensure no leaking
  12. Blockchain based global database prevent some processing units from cheating

More Privacy

  1. User control WHAT data gets LOGGED - not near house, not after 6pm
  2. User control WHICH part of the data is shared - remove certain time and place details before submitting
  3. User control WHO the data is shared with - exact location with researchers and rough location with fellow citizens (just warn them roughly within 100m)
  4. User control WHERE data is processed - researchers only have your location, notifiers only have your identity, no one has both
  5. User control HOW they are notified -
  6. User CAN store data at home - around a hundred dollars you can view years tracks for you and your family
  7. User CAN store data in their favourite email address - encrypted - so gmail can scan these ones to target you with ads
  8. User is the ONLY one to see the full data record
  9. User is the ONLY one to store the full data

More Adaptable

  1. Hunter and Farmer Mode