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Record W3188140690 · doi:10.1111/1758-5899.12888

COVID‐Apps: Misdirecting Public Health Attention in a Pandemic

2021· article· en· W3188140690 on OpenAlexaffabout
Susan L. Erikson

Bibliographic record

VenueGlobal Policy · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicCOVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPandemicPublic healthCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)Isolation (microbiology)PhoneTelehealthBusinessDirectiveInvestment (military)Health careInternet privacyMedicinePublic relationsEconomic growthDiseasePolitical scienceTelemedicineNursingInfectious disease (medical specialty)EconomicsComputer scienceLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

When there is no vaccine for a disease, 'Test, Trace, Treat/Isolate' is the public health go-to directive. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mobile phone apps are designed to improve on this. But COVID-apps have not been effective as a public health tool. Countries spend millions to develop them, yet they have been shown to have terrible return on investment. This commentary explores why COVID-apps are generally championed and provides three brief case studies (Germany, Sierra Leone, Canada) of non-app public health success. In conclusion, I argue that we need to get our public health care priorities straight: Better and more testing; increased investment in manual contact tracing and treatments; hospitalization when necessary; and wrap-around care - assistance with groceries, cleaning, child- or eldercare responsibilities, telehealth doctor appointment hookups - for sick people in home isolation.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.654
Threshold uncertainty score0.847

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.074
GPT teacher head0.368
Teacher spread0.294 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations9
Published2021
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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