 Okay, it's a Thursday morning. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Think Tech Hawaii and I'm gonna be the guest host today and Ethan Allen It's gonna be the host guest. Did I get that right Ethan? Yes indeed Jay This is likable science and welcome to your show Ethan Let's talk about COVID because that's what you know, it just drives us. It compels us You know people who may have shows about rose buds They wind up talking about COVID and and we need to do that because we're talking about science and there's two areas That we should cover, you know one is the articles that have appeared about a collaboration between Google and Apple They were gonna make a you know a tracking a tracking software for your smartphone and app And this was gonna be able to you know find out if you were near anybody who had give you briefly describe How that how that's supposed to work Sure, so the the idea is that well all your phones have GPS in them that's GPS is not Incredibly precise about exactly how how it locates you but your little Bluetooth Applications these very weak radio signals that only travel a few hundred feet can help really localize how close you are To other Bluetooth devices So the idea is that if you have an app running a background it's always sort of sending out pinging other Bluetooth devices and you upload that data and The other people the other owners of the other Bluetooth devices other smartphones can be notified that they've been in contact and are at risk Now there's a whole bunch of different issues What what kind of contact constitutes at risk if you're around a person for 15 seconds Does that mean you're at risk? How does the phone know if you may be there for a long time, but you might be separated by a wall or a window and therefore Yes, right. So it's a there are a huge number of unknowns about this and we really Sorry, we really don't know too much about How many virus particles you need to inhale over what period of time? To put yourself at risk and viruses are incredibly pervasive We live in a sea of viruses every Day on this planet every square yard of the planet is rain downs about 875 million viruses on that So we I mean we're always breathing in viruses Day in day out. It's just this particular one. It's not very good for us, you know Yeah, well, okay, you know, but the big the big thing about this app is that You know what to be effective. It's got to know who's who's who's got the disease And the problem with that is you you got to tell it or somebody has to tell it Now if you tell it yourself on a voluntary basis, that's imperfect to develop an app like this Because some people are reluctant to tell them on a voluntary basis. So you have imperfect spotty data Now if you make the government a repository of that information, ooh, that's oogie You don't want the government to do that. I mean a lot of people would oppose it Even if you and I agreed it was an important government function We would also agree that leadership should not to be trusted especially now And and furthermore, there would be people who would oppose it in any event. It's a conceptual matter They don't want government to know who's got who's got the virus even though there's a good public policy to you know to have government know and to have maybe some Trusted institution in the country. No, but this whole system is not going to work if privacy prevails technology People have got to be agreeable to allowing the system to know who's infected And that's the problem and that's why I think they they ran into trouble. They announced this collaboration Well, it must be six weeks ago already time goes by and you haven't seen more on it except the fact that everybody's raising the privacy issue Ethan do you think anybody you know think it's gonna go anywhere here? It's so far It may be good on a technical level, but it's still got a it's got to work, you know as it's deployed right and there are There are big issues and nobody really knows that there are models about how Much of the population has to have such an app and use such an app before it becomes effective If only one or two percent of the population have the app and use it It's probably not going to do any good really for anyone. It's 95 percent of your population has the app and uses it It's going to be great. I mean you're really going to catch a lot of cases neither of those extremes likely to happen Not here in this country as a culture point it has happened in China for instance Right, they make you do it and Korea also has a tracking app Right, so in that case it's one of many tools, but it is it is being deployed effectively And you know that if you have all the pieces working It can be very useful in finding out or any other virus, right? Yeah, I mean it can I gather in China It's hooked up to a basically a health card that you also have on your phone That basically will change color and basically alert others that you know you you shouldn't You can't come in here your car is turned red because you've gotten you know You were we expect you're exposed to shutting virus now, but yeah, it's Australia is using it. It's pretty it's pretty popular there people that apparently trust our government pretty well They're already talking about Reopening Australia New Zealand trade and travel pretty easily and even maybe including some of the small Pacific Island nations where again because of their isolation They haven't really had much COVID problem. So But I predict that in the future we're going to see more of this. It's inevitable. Oh, yeah the technology and You know the need to know the need to do the demographic and it's going to prevail or privacy considerations We've seen that in so many other contexts one kissing cousin on this app is the app They've been talking about for tourism in Waikiki to enforce Quarantine for tourists for example, they have no way to enforce that now We're gonna have an armed guard stand at the guy's door where he spends, you know So we got to know where the tourists is we have to track his movements This is not hard and it's not really all that invasive for a tourist who cares He doesn't care if you know where he is. I guess mostly That's what he's doing doesn't it but it would be it's sort of like one of those Bracelets that you wear if you're if you're being watched by say of a criminal authority And you can't get it off and it always feeds back now This is we don't do bracelets, but we can do this on your smartphone And if you turn your smartphone off it can still work We know that smartphones work even when they're off and even if you've got around that The authorities could require you to call it at a certain interval So that they can feel confident that you're in the right place Have you heard anything about, you know, the possibility of this being rolled out here in Hawaii? I Haven't really but the point was made a while ago that if we really want Hawaii to thrive Hawaii has to be seen as a safe destination and If we want to do that we have to as you point out do something have some system in place where we can basically ensure visitors that they are relatively safe from Any such disease and it's going to take something like that the visitors basically here will have to sort of sign a waiver and say yes I agree to have this uploaded on my phone. I know it's going to track me wherever I go, you know, and I Presumably it would be linked to some sort of a Same kind of thing as we're talking that the Google Apple Well, that's a very good point. I mean it can be used to determine whether the person is abiding by quarantine Except I don't think quarantine is going to last that much longer, is it so then you say well We want to know where he is, but we only know if he's near anybody who's Contagious or anybody who's not contagious is near him when we find he is contagious That requires everyone in the state or at least a you know a number of people the herd so to speak in the state to have comparable Apps on their phones and then you get back into the privacy issue Then you get back to this entity between Tourists and local people where they don't want to cooperate. They don't care about tourists kind of thing Yeah, so you'd have to do some selling to get local people to buy into an app that could turn into You know the kind of tracking app that Google and Apple have been considering Yeah, and you know again There's a good deal of debate in the world and a lot of models that are being done about how much of the population Really has to be start using that but it looks like roughly if roughly half of the cell phone users Put such an app on their phone It would probably begin to have some significant impacts on on the spread you could if it's you know If there's some follow-up to it if there is contact tracking and tracing it one way you could actually Encourage people to put the app on the phone is to go further than just tracking you could use it for developing data That's really important You know how many people are in touch with other people who may have the disease or do have the disease and then you could You could build a model so to speak of the demographics Which takes us to our second kind of technology that we want to talk to about today You sent me a very interesting article by the rand blog which I guess is related to the rand corporations at think tank But it talks about the different kinds of demographic models that we have going now some more successful than others some based on data some based on you know conceptual considerations and some based on a Variety of factors including current events that happened this morning in order to develop models. Can you talk about it? Well There it's very interesting I mean if you look sort of globally you see the demographic trends that make such a difference That is it was predicted that by this time there will be huge Covid spikes in places where there are People very densely packed into urban areas and the health care systems are not good such as parts of India and Bangladesh It simply hasn't come to pass The people there that packed into these places of health care systems are not ready But they really have not had very bad outbreak Their numbers of cases are miscalculable compared to the US and it's largely because of demographics Because those countries are young countries most of their population is centered in kids Teenagers or young adults with a relatively small percentage of older people And that that's a huge a huge factor That's how Baldy are impacted Yeah, well, you know, I think what's interesting to me is that All of these have a certain subjective quality because you have to make choices yet to make assumptions in the case of Even in the case of the flat-out dollars and cents kind of metric Data statistics that go into most models You have to make choices about what data you're using and how you're getting it and there, you know, there are vagaries there But I suppose you can say for those it's based on actual Data and presumably there are scientific standards that allow you to collect the best data Although I think those are evolving right now. So that one is probably the more, you know Rational more reliable if you understand the assumptions The one that's conceptual is that's much more subjective And the one the one that depends on current events that happen and feed a variety of Variables in based on what's happened lately. That's very subjective. And so query, you know, what kind of Um, what kind of reliability should we put on these things? I mean, uh, was it I think it was the State of oh, yeah, it was Columbia University Correctly predicted that we'd have over a hundred thousand deaths already God every time I say that number kills me because I don't I don't think the White House understands what a hundred thousand deaths means Um, it's just overwhelming overwhelming and I every time we mention that number. I want to tell people it's overwhelming. It's incredible Anyway, so I think the Columbia model predicted that the washington model, which is Oh, I'm sorry. The Columbia model Was a backward model. There's two kinds there, too Backward and forward the Columbia model said that if you had behaved better if you had used a better system Uh, two or three weeks ago, we would have saved 30 30,000 lives. That's what that's Columbia Um, right the washington model was different that was looking forward and they predicted something like 70,000 deaths. They were off That was not accurate really 30 000 deaths is a lot of deaths Um, and and then of course there's various other models. So I guess, you know, what I'm saying is this competing models I don't know if the government is funding any of these or participating or even giving data I think they're getting data from the states because trump has left it to the states You know to stumble around on this So uh, query whether any of them is useful At least to establish um, a Whether we would have saved more lives looking backward or b how many lives we're going to lose going forward What's your level of confidence in this kind of model? I mean, as you say, they're they're evolving. Uh, the models are evolving some some have proven uh shockingly inaccurate. Um Uh, I was just speaking to some of those about how how the virus would behave in in some urban centers in the developing countries, but it's It's also important. You were talking to one about the model takes into account current factors. I mean, that's that's what you You sort of got to realize there's a fundamental biology here, right? somebody somebody who has this virus Sneezes and they've expelled suddenly tens of millions of viral particles in a stream a cloud A fairly dense cloud that goes out 10 or 15 feet away from them and starts diffusing and again depending on how the wind is It's very still air that cloud may sort of hang there for a while and gradually settle down Uh, if there's wind it starts carrying it, but again, it gets more and more dispersed all the time That when you run into that cloud and how dispersed that cloud is You know means you may inhale a few viruses, which probably doesn't be any harm or 10,000 viruses Which your body probably can deal with But if you happen to sort of hit the wrong part of that cloud, right? Uh Hit a swirl or an eddy where it's it's particularly dense, you know, you may inhale a million viruses Which may be enough to really start a whole case for you. So there is this huge sort of It's not exactly random, but but but it's a very hard to know element about about the virus and the spread Yeah, so the idea is to connect the model Or the sub model as a case may be Um to that phenomenon Right and protect you. I mean, I think where there's two levels of policy Which should be should take into account the results and recommendations of these various models that we that are evolving One one is the government. So if the government finds And I suppose you have to look at it area by area because if you find that the meatpacking plant across the street Has, uh, you know a substantial percent of infections That is instructive on whether you should open or close the economy and how you should conduct, um, you know, the law Uh, and the proclamation says it were in that area, I suppose or in like areas Which may not be in that little town or city. It may be across the state border So the federal government always has a role here. Nobody can tell me that the federal government can stand back and do nothing It's got to instruct the federal government as to like situations in other areas in terms of determining policy Uh, the federal government done a terrible job. I want to say that too, you know Just like just like the point of what is a hundred thousand deaths mean I think it has to be emphasized that the federal government has done a terrible job There's no issue about it. Um, anyway, so that one thing is what public policy means Um, in terms of federal action state action Coordinated action and so forth. The other is personal It's personal. It's my policy Um, you know, for example, you know, I have to decide whether to go to a senior facility This is a gross example whether to go to a senior facility because I can't handle things anymore. Um I'm not going to do that now The information is so clear Um, and and so there are a lot of examples like that about where you live what you do How careful you are in a given community If if it is determined in a model that masks are very helpful Or if they have been helpful to this community in these circumstances, that's information That's advice and counseling to me on how I conduct my life So I need to hear I need to hear advice from these model people too right, so it's As you say, I think the government needs to basing its policies on evidence You know and which our government currently does not seem very strong on Looking at evidence or wanting to pay any attention to it But that's the only rational way to handle this but each individual too Should have that same attitude. So the comparison has been made Uh during london and world war two The blackouts they did you know enforce people that said, you know, gotta pull down how blackout curtains blah blah blah Anyone who who violated that blackout? It wasn't just don't hey, you know, you can't tell me I have to pull my shade down Because they're shaving up Endangered not only themselves, but all other neighbors, right and people who ignore Good public health advice about social distancing and all are essentially doing the same thing They're not just endangering themselves. They're endangering everyone around them And it's there's a real piece of social responsibility that has to be Emphasized here that we all we all are like it or not in this together We all have to work together to to to get it treated, you know to get it dealt with Yeah, we have to deal with it together. They understand that in korea japan china That's I have to work together and I find it remarkable in this country that we don't understand that Even if you disagree with the policy, you know You have to agree with the morality of saving your neighbor I find it extraordinary that people reject that completely and go out Um, you know the national the national concert on sunday. They're all sitting there thousands of them No masks shoulder to shoulders spreading virus. I mean unbelievable and the government is directly involved in this Wait till you see the parade on july 4th. It's going to be the same thing in washington It's ignoring the science And it more than Failing to establish a policy that coordinates these efforts Frankly, in my opinion, there ought to be serious Sanctions if you endanger your neighbor By the way oblique to that point like you thought about it. There are a lot of people using technology against Saving your neighbor. They're scamming. They're selling faulty PPE Um, they're taking advantage of the situation Uh, they're you know charging too much money and providing ineffective equipment. What have you a million things like that And and they're getting away with it now if if I was the government On that one, uh, those people are jeopardizing everyone else And uh, I would put them in the clink for a long time um Because because if you endanger multiple people as you say in the blackout It's much more significant than just endangering yourself I think we have failed to uh to make laws that enforce the notion Are protecting your neighbor and a lot of people don't care about protecting their neighbor the people who went into the Michigan state house a couple well just a week ago Extraordinary how you know irresponsible and how inconsiderate they are of the health of their neighbors and the community And it's not only in michigan. It's all around the country Right and you know as a country we have this very strong history and streak of individualism and We are all able To go off and do what we want to do and be who we want to be right the wild west sort of mentality and unfortunately that does typically sort of then ignore The sense of community and responsibility to a community that we in this country tend to To lack or have in very low dose compared to a lot of other places Uh in the pacific islands where I did some work some years ago very very strong sense of community Where you would set aside people would set aside their own goals and aspirations because I understood they had Obligations to their family their friends their their community So yeah, it's it's it's a huge a huge thing and as you say I need Somehow to build a better sense of that in this country and whether it's through laws to enforce it or Incentives to encourage it. I'm not I'm not sure Yeah, maybe both but but it starts with leadership and we don't have that here and we have device of this instead of leadership Absolutely, the two things we've talked about today in this show primarily is uh one is the um you know the idea of having an effective app and um that that has Obstacles by virtue of the the divisiveness over the issue of privacy and the divisiveness as to whether to take it to use it to You know actually take advantage of the technology and that and that's a failure of community It's a failure of leadership because obviously it would help us But I think I think it's clear that people are not going to do it in the way That it needs to be done and the second the second thing is is a similar um common denominator That in the in the case of public policy based on evidence In the case of public policy based on these models as they evolve and get better and better You have to listen to them. You have to develop public policy You have to implement public policy have to get people to go along with the public policy You you know you initiate and we don't have that everybody going his own individualistic way So the problem is that technology has a real barrier in these united states at this moment in time of being an effective way to deal With covet. What do you think about that? Yeah, and this this actually gets into a sort of the related area of the uncertainties around safe issues like climate change They're well the general phenomenon is well known well accepted by virtually every single scientist who's Father take a look at it There are a lot of uncertainties unknowns that the there's all kinds of interesting models based some on historical data some on projected trends some on theoretical considerations And yeah, some are going to prove to be more accurate than others over time, but that's that's Sort of part and parcel of science, you know science isn't all about the knowns. It's all about the unknowns and and Getting you know, it's not about finding the truth. It's about sort of getting closer to the truth Uh, and that's fundamentally what the same thing is about There's so much unknown about This virus and how it spreads and how it pays that all we can do is sort of keep hacking back and forth gradually moving closer and closer to some truth some accurate policy on it and That's that's going to mean the policies are going to change and evolve and advice that seemed like it was sound at one point It's now going to be seen as outdated and unsound That that happens, you know and people should accept that I think we've done a poor job of having people understand that's the way science works and We need to do that as you say and it takes leadership from the top basically Admit that up front that we've got a lot that we don't know here. We've got a potentially dangerous situation and we should You know err on the side of caution until we Know more about it. Yeah. Well, I think it's a really good point People have to understand the scientific process. It's not so much as you know, a rule of science that you must follow It's understanding the process reaching the truth Finding the statue in the marble, so to speak It's there and we all have to work together to support our our science And the problem we have now today, which is you know, beyond what the experience might have been is that we have misinformation and disinformation coming from the top Confusing about the science giving us bad science, you know that are not The information advice counseling we get from the top is contrary to science And so this creates a confusion A consternation and it becomes that much more difficult to convince people about the essential Quality of science and how you do science and how you implement science and how you base public policy on science So right now it's a morass. I would say Right and and that's to me that that is that that's appalling that Our government leaders are in some sense sowing sowing seeds of mistrust in science Science is not perfect. Science is a human institution like all others. There are good scientists. There are bad scientists There are scientists who are selfless and will go the extra mile to be sure everything is good There are people other people who employ science for their own personal and selfish gains But science the whole has a self-correcting process That does it doesn't find the truth, but it brings us ever closer to the truth by its nature and to blatantly Ignore that and you say so disinformation and disinformation cost lives it Makes it divides the people And then yeah, it in some sense it undermines the scientific process, you know, so it's appalling Yes, it does and and and and that and that goes in other areas not just in coven So, you know, maybe we'll learn but we haven't learned so far as a matter of fact I would even venture to say we are we are worse off now than we were when we started this game Um, we respect science. We are receiving more Disinformation than before and and we're gonna have to learn the hard way And and this is very troubling and I hope that We find other ways to deal with it But I think the reality is before we understand we're responsible for our neighbor before we understand about science and the process Before we understand about basic policy Um, and and personal decisions on good science, uh, we're gonna suffer a lot more Um, so we have to listen to a good scientist like you, Ethan Ethan's a scientist In order to do that, but it's a long way. It's a long way home and it's a test of humanity Is it it's a test of the humanity on the planet? And there are I mean there are lots of good scientists doing Anthony Fauci is it's an amazing guy who's gone huge Gone the extra mile to really help provide good information Uh, and some government leaders, uh, androquo mox brings to mind listen to people like Fauci follow that advice Uh, they set decisions on on the best available science and really help make the situation better Uh, that's not always true unfortunately, but yeah Well, we have to look overseas too. There's some very effective leaders overseas in Asia In new zealand of australia for example in korea japan Even taiwan those places are dealing with it better than we are And uh, maybe we should learn that the world is indeed flat. It is indeed global America was might have been exceptional some time ago, but it is it's not exceptional now Uh, and we have our problems, um internally and externally and we and we should we should watch what happens elsewhere and respect it Um, that's what we're learning from us save ourselves. Yeah, please absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah Okay, ethan alan scientists Our excellent scientists I hope we can do this again very soon ethan there's more to come, you know every day is a bunch of surprises There's always new fun stuff to talk about with science. Jerry. I'm always happy to do it. Thank you, ethan. Aloha. All right. Aloha