 Oh, so nice to be live. So nice to be back. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. And more specifically, this is likeable science. Isn't that fabulous? Like the good old days with Ethan Allen, remember him? And Ethan joins us today on likeable science. Hi, Ethan. How are you? Hey, Jay. I'm well. How about yourself? Good. I'm happy and good news. I'm in good health. So Ethan, tell us what you've been doing. You went to APCSS and APCSS, like everybody else, is affected by coronavirus. Can you talk about it? Sure. We're all like so many others. We're all on telework now. So I sit at home all day and work via computer, do all my meetings via different web-based meeting technologies, writing papers, that kind of thing. But I should put in a little disclaimer here that anything you hear today is purely my own personal opinion. Does not, in any sense, reflect government viewpoints or anything like that. Clear enough. So let's begin our substantive discussion. You know, the thing we were going to discuss, at least primarily, is the technology that was announced in all the tech journals and the newspapers a couple of days ago. That is that, you know, Google and Apple are collaborating in an app, which you could put on your smartphone, that would help track coronavirus cases. Can you talk about it? Well, what's really interesting to me is that the two who generally have not collaborated on very many things at all are working apparently very much hand and glove to make this happen. They recognize the power of having a good way to track contacts, track potential cases. That is such a, it's the key to keeping the whole thing under control. If you can know when you test somebody, who they, and they test positive, who they've been in touch with in the past days or weeks, that's you've got this tremendous leg up on the whole business, because you can go to those people then and get them tested and find out before they go off and start spreading the virus. So it's an incredibly powerful thing. I'm very interested to see how that comes out. Well, I always said that if they threw you and me in a room together, it gave us a couple of hours. We could solve any problem, design any app, whatever. So why don't we spend a few minutes here, Ethan, and design this app, okay? You download it on your phone. It's going to use, I suppose it's going to use GPS, maybe Bluetooth, and it's going to watch people near you. And Bluetooth has a radius, what, a distance, a range of like 20, 30 feet, maybe more. I'm not sure about that. And wireless, of course, is greater. GPS is well unlimited. So the question is, what would it be looking for? And what would it do with the data that it got? So this is an interesting thing that they both Google and Apple have made very public statements about absolutely that they want to protect users' privacy. And this is purely a voluntary system. So you would have to download it onto your app. And then, I mean, onto your phone, downloads app. And then if you tested positive and reported this to some appropriate government agency, it wasn't quite clear who you had to report this to. But then you could essentially label yourself on this app as a positive case. And this app apparently would go back and search for some period of time, search your Bluetooth and, I guess, how you would contact other people. And somehow, and this is where I actually do not understand well from the descriptions I've read, without revealing who those people are. Somehow, in touch with them and let them know that they have been exposed, basically, or may have been exposed. They had contact with a positive case. Yeah, I just imagine it goes both ways. If it somehow knows that you're positive, it's going to tell the people around you, or somehow deal with that. I mean, somehow communicate that to somebody. And if the guy around you is positive, then it's going to tell you somehow and then you can take some action about that. These are all very interesting questions from a computer and a kind of social connection, a computer communication connection issue. And you're right, they're loaded with ethical questions and privacy questions. But let's go further. So this means, you say voluntary, but you know, voluntary has a way of becoming involuntary, such as in China. Let me refresh that. In China, you have to have your phone on. You must have it on. If it's not on, you can't demonstrate that to the police, I guess, they're in trouble. So you must have your phone on. And I suppose that if you had a positive test on this, that somehow is going to be connected with you. There's going to be a database somewhere that says on your phone, this guy has a positive test. Then the police would know that, or you would know that. And arguably, this app is emulated in China. Maybe they'll just give it to China. I mean, this is a worldwide issue. Then the guy nearby, he will know that you, you know, and I mean, I guess the most useful, correct me if I'm wrong, the most useful recipient of this information about who's near you and who may have, who has been near you. It's like that secret Apple file that was such a conundrum a couple of years ago, a few years ago, where they found that in the Apple phone, there was a GPS data file, which kept the record of every place you'd been, essentially by the minute. And everybody said, gee, why do you need, I don't need that information. Is that going back to Apple? And Apple said, no comment. It was really creepy. I don't know if it still exists. But here we have the same kind of thing. We have that phone, which could be registered on a location basis, sending back little beeps about where you are. Who would be most interested in this? Well, if it was in China, especially Wuhan, the government would be the most interested party. Not you, not the guy 20 feet away, but you. And that's very troubling because it's an inevitable shift of this app, don't you think? I don't know how inevitable it is, but it's certainly be very appealing to any central authority to have that kind of information. Now, as I said, both Apple and Google have come out very strong, made very strong, very public, very definite statements that the user's privacy is utmost in this. And this data is somehow stripped of any identifying characteristics so that nobody getting it can make any person. Okay, well, let's let's take the government out of the equation. It's a later thing. We can revisit that as time goes by. But I guess the interesting thing for me is if somebody is within X feet of me, within range, and that person has been recorded somehow or has recorded himself somehow as a test positive, then I would know. It would tell me. It would tell me why. Better get tested, right? It would tell me that. It would tell me, oh, quick wash your hands or whatever, you know, kind of therapeutic things that could do. It would tell me to take a therapeutic drug, maybe. It would take me, you know, tell me to be very careful, I guess. It would probably be smart enough to give me. Yeah, go ahead. No, it's interesting what would it do that would protect the user's privacy? So you walk into a room, there's one person in the room and suddenly your app goes off and says, you know, uh-oh, uh-oh. I mean, right away, you're going to sort of know, like, oh, okay, Joe over there. And yes, I mean, right now, of course, there is no particular drug that's been demonstrated to be very effective in protecting us. So yes, all it could really do is give you sort of heads up and yes, perhaps some good advice to go, yes, go wash your hands, move yourself out of an area. And if you've been around long enough, you know, you should probably then self-isolate too. Yeah, you know, another possibility is, I said, what, 20 feet and the rule is six feet? And of course, we know now that it travels by micro, micro droplets and all that, that even micro droplets are not immediate and they're not that close. So what it could do, the range of the Bluetooth or the range of the wireless is going to be more than the range of the micro droplets, which means you could say, Jay, Jay, there's somebody in this room and he's, you know, it's like a radar and naval warfare. There's somebody in this room and he's, you know, at 30 degrees, then he's coming closer to you and he's not yet in range. It's time for you to change your room, get out of this room and take a walk. Right. I mean, this is, how will this thing work? That's what I want to sort of see is, yeah, will it give you that kind of heads up that, you know, there is a potential virus shed or coming within range, you know, and you best watch out. Is it going to do that? Or is it only going to alert you, you know, after the fact, which would be a little bit less useful? But it does have the information at the fact though. It would have that. It would have a range that's beyond the range of the droplets, hopefully, and it would be able to tell you in advance of whether this person is coming in your direction. I love this. This is really out of science fiction. Give you some advice. Yeah. I mean, does it know whether a person is in another room, right? If a person is in the next room, even if they're three feet away from you, two feet away from you, there may be no risk at all to you, right? I mean, you don't want to walk into that next room. But how does this app know this? And furthermore, the one thing they point out, one of the articles I was reading was that the, it's going to rely on self-report. So, of course, people being people, there will be people who will, who will doubtless self-report as being positive. And that'll sort of screw with the system, right? Well, I want to dwell on there. There's a big privacy issue there because, you know, it's very unlikely that the average person in any state of the union, maybe any country, and I don't know how this could be changed, will tell you, hey, Ethan, I just went down through HPH and I got a test and they told me I'm positive. You're going to tell me that not so quick because it's a total stigma. You know, as soon as you tell me that, whoop, you know, back off, don't touch this guy, you know, make distance. And I'm thinking that most people that I can imagine won't tell you. They will not reveal this. It's a secret. It's a, it's a, it's a HIPAA privacy thing rather than a public health thing, don't you think? Well, yeah, I mean, there is sort of historically, it's been true that any of the big epidemics that have been very heavy stigma attached to the disease back at the plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, any of these things. There was basically a, you know, in some cases, very severe penalties for being thought even to have it. You might be literally burned alive, you know, back in the medieval days. So that is one of the very interesting things. Will the public at large use this to report themselves? Or will they all, as you sort of say, you know, why should I tell them that? That's just going to, that's going to scare everyone around me. You know, why, why should I do that? But what's, what's, you know, for me sort of as a, as a sufferer from this disease? Yeah, I, you'd have to find it in a sense of it. We can brain brain do a brain, a brain meeting on that too. But it just, it occurred to me though that this room for mischief here, if you could hack into somebody and self report him, that would be, that would be really drastic because it would mean everybody around him would say, no, I don't want to be anywhere near that guy. You know, and even though he doesn't have a positive result, I don't be any near that guy. I don't do business with him. I don't want to have anything to do. And he's isolated now. He's pariah. He's a pariah. And you could really screw somebody up by, by making a false report. So how do you, how do you keep this straight? First of all, you have to prevent hackers. You have to prevent mischief. I think it's very important. I don't know how you do that. Maybe, maybe one thing is you impose horrendous penalties. Anybody tries that. Two is, you know, you lock the system down so nobody can do it. But on the voluntary side, how do you incentivize people to be honest and to push the button and say, yes, I'm positive, all by themselves as a voluntary matter? How do you do that? Yeah, I mean, I mean, it's, it's a very intriguing distinction. All of us would love to see this app and have it and be able to know like there is somebody, a potential virus shatter coming near me, you know, so and so is likely shedding the virus. Therefore, yes, I should stay away from so and so. And, you know, we would all, a bunch of people would probably pay good money for that, right? Just for that, that knowledge, because it brings safety. But as you point out, will people report it? Will people report about themselves? So, you know, everyone wants it for everyone else, but nobody wants it for themselves. Well, you know, strikes me that if, if we want the system to really work in the theoretical, as, as contemplated, we're not, we volunteer, voluntary may not work, certainly because of the pariah aspect of the stigma. So maybe there's a sort of narrow pathway that it can be done, you know, on a non voluntary basis. That's euphemistic, I know. So, for example, I go and I get tested, and my test is positive. Now, part of the transaction in which I am advised that my test is positive is that I got to tell them my cell phone and, and I got to, I go into a database. And maybe as you say, it's anonymous. It's just by my cell phone, I guess. And, and that, that means the government or at least the state government or at least the health system has a database of all the positives and they put it on my phone. So I guess what I'm saying is that it may not be, it may not work very well as voluntary. And maybe we have to bring in third parties and maybe we have to plant it on your phone. Maybe we have to tell you that if you're out and about, and your phone will know that this phone must be on and that app must be on or you're going to be penalized in some way. In that way, the system would be absolute. It would work. Everybody would know the guy in the next room, the fellow coming down on me at 30 degrees, you know, I go to be in my, in my range in five seconds, everybody would know. It would make me paranoid, by the way. I'd be looking at the phone all the time, waiting for that beep, you know. Everyone turn on their alerts. Well, I mean, it is interesting if you look, I don't know if you had this experience, but without ever trying, some music showed up on iTunes for me. There was some music from certain artists who arranged through iTunes to have their music downloaded to everyone's iTunes, basically. And they did it without, I never asked for it. I never told them to do it, but I've got, I've got their music. And if they can do that, then yes, they could take this app, presumably, and download it onto your phone without your, without your knowledge or consent, right? Yeah. It seems likely to me, you know, they might have to, they might have to be sort of a stealth business where it's, it's downloaded under the guise of something else, one of the other apps that you sort of is on your phone, you can't get rid of. And then the whole thing does, right, but then the whole thing develops a sort of a weirdly, yes, a Machiavellian rather troubling idea that, okay, now we can't get away from Big Brother who is watching us. You know, as I say, you know, in my, I mean, you may not feel the same level of inevitability, but I feel when they come down with this thing, you know, the first people to look at it is going to be government state, federal health agencies, what have you to see if they can make the theoretical into the practical. And it would be very helpful. Any whole healthcare industry would love it, you know, that would enable them to focus their work exactly where it's needed to get the cases very quickly, flatten the whole curve, you know, really stop things from spreading. You know, I would guess that there are healthcare industry operational on folks right now in the conversation with Apple and Google saying, how can we ensure this gets on to people's phones that we have this data, you know, because it's so incredibly valuable. Well, there's two elements that feed into this to make it logically perfect. One is the most obvious one is testing, because we still don't have enough testing, and the tests should be easy, fast, you know, like a pregnancy test, you hop into the bathroom, make a test, and, you know, in two minutes flat, you know what you got. Now, one thing that could be interesting is you hop into the bathroom, take a test, whatever, spew them, whatever it is, but you can't read it. You can't read it. In order to read it, you have to have a sensor that looks maybe a QR code or something that looks at the sensing device, okay, and that sends it back to a health organization. And the health organization is the only one that can read the code on the QR, the QR picture. Okay. And, okay, that's good. And it interprets that, and it gives you an answer right away, but in so doing, I'll Google and Apple are listening to this, in so doing, it's in the database. Now we know that you are tested. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, the tests we right now have a whole slew of different tests. A lot of them have not been thoroughly themselves sort of verified or vetted very well. I presume they're not good. I'm sure they vary in quality. But yes, what you do want is a test that is, you know, gives, you know, no false positives, no false negatives, is quick, painless, absolutely reliable. That's, you know, that's a dream come true for everyone and cheap, too, of course, so easy to make so you can get a lot of them out there quickly. Yeah. It's, it's what we, what we really need. I mean, I mean, testing and identification of particularly of asymptomatic carriers is the, you know, what's, what's going to really beat this thing back down, you know. Other than that, it's a really hit-or-miss kind of system. Do you think that masks play a role in this, Ethan? In other words, if you're making a new paradigm, where do masks play the role in, you know, in pushing the curve down and having no cases? If you had the app and you had the testing and you had that database, where would masks fit? Would they help also? I believe they would, particularly in places where people cannot help but congregate. For instance, a condo building or any, any high-rise building where you're in an elevator, right? You've got this small space, people are getting in and out of it all the time. Somebody gets into it, they cough, the door's open, they leave, you step in, right? Yeah, unless you're, if your app immediately new and it says, you know, don't step into that elevator, that would be great, but that seems unlikely given the current technology. That's, I think, you know, that's one of the big places where, where you really want to wear masks in space that has reason and high levels of traffic, right? In a perfect world, we would have a mask with a, with a RFID in it, and the phone would be able to know whether the mask was on our face. And if it should be, it wasn't, the phone would remind us. You could have if you, if you sophisticated a perfect world, right? You would have a test on the mask, right? If the mask outside of the mask ran into viruses, it would send a signal immediately saying, you are in the presence of, you know, I'm sensing viruses around you, you know, do something. That'd be wonderful. Of course, a vaccine would make all of this unnecessary. But in the future, I think we'll have other coronaviruses that we need to we need to deal with before we get to vaccine. So one more thing. I really liked the fact, I mean, in back in 2014, we were preparing for this, Barack Obama basically said, Hey, this is a huge upcoming health concern. We really need to put the machinery in place now, the mechanisms in place. And right now, you know, Bill Gates is sitting there funding, funding several different companies to ramp up to full scale production for vaccines, knowing that probably five of those will just, they'll just be robust because they won't be ones that really work well, and only a couple of them will work well. But he's, he understands like it's so important to get the vaccine out there right now that he's willing to sort of toss billions of dollars at this issue, knowing essentially it will save millions of dollars in the end. So well, I mean, it's a horrible thought, but I saw one little piece yesterday that they said that this problem would be resolved if and when we can develop a vaccine and it raised the specter, the possibility that we may not be able to do that, that our technology is not good enough quite yet global technology is not good enough to actually come up with a vaccine. And that is chilling. Oh, no, I think we'll have a vaccine. I think we'll have a vaccine fairly quickly. Your point that you just said a moment ago is the worrisome thing. So we get a vaccine for this one. What about next year? You know, these zoonotic viruses are all over the place, seem to show a nice ability to jump to people, you know, so we're bound to see something else. And if it's not a coronavirus, it's going to go into other viruses, you know, and that means a whole new thing. Yes, we need to be putting in place public health preparation systems, pandemic preparation systems to identify early instances, but also to just ramp up and be able to do it. Vaccines are incredibly time consuming to scale up. And there needs to be huge investments, I think, in that whole technology to make that faster. So you can create a vaccine and scale up production very, very quickly. I mean, it's still a lot of that. It's done the old fashioned way. This has been done for 40 years, you know, with eggs and incubation and blah, blah, blah. It's a long process to develop inequality. Yeah, we got to do, we got to do better. We got to find ways to skirt all that delay. And hopefully somebody will and it won't be 18 months. But let me go to one last question. We only have a minute left here. This is a hard question. So we have the system, the system where we have a database of people, you know, who have arguably have a test positive. We have an app on everybody's phone that reads that one way or another. Enter the world of drones. Because China is using drones on this. They're monitoring things, watching things. Where did drones fit in our little universe that we just built, Ethan? How can drones help on this? Well, again, if they're linked in that same network, I mean, the drones, in a sense, a perfect thing to say, oh, look, here's a carrier walking down the street. Here's you. You're as yet two blocks away. But, you know, by the by heads up, you know, there's a guy in a red shirt who is a carrier who is seems to be on a potential path towards you, you know, watch out for them. You know, they could be very powerful. Equally, of course, they could be used very much as a course of control measure to, you know, hey, you were supposed to be isolating. We saw that at 1035, you open your door and stepped out to, you know, walk down the street. So as many things that do use. Yeah, but it sounds to me like drones would be an enforcement method, you know, rather than a sensing method or a notification method, because in truth, if we're both on the same cell phone network, right, then the cell phone network is going to know you and it's going to know me. It's going to know whether I'm infected or you're infected. And that would be a very large network miles away or, you know, a mile away or a half a mile away. The point is that the cell phone network can tell you as much as a drone can about who's where and who's infected or not. So it sounds like the value of a drone is really to enforce. I mean, I recall reading, you know, they have loudspeakers on the drone. So the drone comes down over you and says, you know, don't do this or you better go home or something. It's like a policeman. Right. Okay, we're out of time. Ethan, you want to have any final words or people to make people aware of the issues here? Just, you know, use common sense, wear a mask in any crowded place, wash your hands, you know, self isolate until this whole thing passes. Okay, knock wood. It should be successful for all of us every single one. Thank you so much. I hope we can do this again. There are millions of fish in the ocean and millions of issues to try. Thank you so much. I look forward to it. You take care.