Singapore’s contact-tracing smarthphone app TraceTogether (Photo by CATHERINE LAI/AFP via Getty Images)

PoliticsJuly 16, 2020

Voluntary app ‘almost certain to achieve nothing’, CovidCard backers told PM

BusinessDesk editor

Singapore’s contact-tracing smarthphone app TraceTogether (Photo by CATHERINE LAI/AFP via Getty Images)

The high-powered group behind a Bluetooth-enabled, credit card-sized alternative to Covid Tracer warned Ardern a month ago that a voluntary app was doomed to fail, reports BusinessDesk editor Pattrick Smellie.

The Ministry of Health’s Covid Tracer smartphone app is “almost certain to achieve nothing with regard to slowing the virus,” says a report received in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet more than a month ago from the backers of an alternative tracing technology option known as the CovidCard.

BusinessDesk has obtained a copy of the June 5 final report on the locally developed Bluetooth alternative. It says “we do not consider it possible for a voluntary app to reach the requisite levels of compliant adoption or, therefore, have any impact on contact tracing efforts of the spread of Covid-19”.

It suggests that New Zealand’s Covid elimination strategy can only be credibly maintained with much greater adoption of an easier to use tracing technology than currently exists.

Prime minister Jacinda Ardern and health minister Chris Hipkins yesterday called for New Zealanders to start using the official Covid Tracer app because of its importance as one tool in the urgent contact tracing efforts that will be required in the likely event that there is a Covid-19 outbreak at some point in the future.

About one in eight New Zealanders have downloaded the app and one in 16 may be using it on a daily basis, a rate that Ardern said was “not good enough”. She added that if businesses were not voluntarily displaying the QR code posters enabling the app’s use, the government may consider making it mandatory.

Hipkins said 11,000 people had downloaded the app since yesterday’s call, meaning 607,000 people now have it on a smartphone.

However, the CovidCard report says that “the required rate of compliant adoption for any digital contact tracing technology is in excess of 60%”.

“A compliant adoption rate of 40%, which is well beyond that achieved by any contact tracing app, thus far, would still only detect 16% of encounters. The goal for any digital contact tracing initiative really needs to target coverage of 80% of the most high risk encounters: bars, restaurants, public transport, private parties etc.

“Our existing digital apps – the NZ Covid Tracer app – including the planned future roadmap, are almost certain to achieve nothing with regard to slowing the virus. Promoting solutions that so obviously don’t work is damaging because it erodes our future ability to drive adoption tools that can be effective.”

The CovidCard initiative has been backed by Trade Me founder Sam Morgan and former Air NZ chief executive, Rob Fyfe, who worked from the Beehive in collaboration between the government and private sector in the early phases of the covid pandemic response. The report estimates it would cost $100 million to put in place.

It involves a wearable swipecard-sized plastic tag that is fitted with a Bluetooth chip that sends a constant signal and picks up and registers signals from cards it comes into contact with. It carries no personal information and requires nothing from the wearer but to remember to carry it, and would allow contacts of a person who tests positive for Covid-19 to be rapidly traced by matching CovidCard records to mobile phone numbers.

Speed of notification was identified by Ardern yesterday as one of the most important ways that technologies could assist with contact tracing, which she said would always be a primarily human-based activity.

‘Foolish’ to rely on tech

Ardern said primary reliance on technological tracing systems would be “foolish”.

“The most important thing is still for us to establish who we had close contact with in personal one-to-one interviews, carried out multiple times, and then followed up by a team of individuals to ensure that others who have been in close contact are isolated and are tested,” said Ardern. “That will still remain key. What we consider the technological solutions to be is an extra safety net on top of the core activity and so we will never solely rely on them.

“I think to do so would be foolish. We do, however, see what they can add if they are utilised,” she said.

However, the paper summarising the success of early field trials also makes clear that it would take at least six months to roll out a CovidCard because of the requirement for further testing – some of which is now under way – and the need to build trust in them in the New Zealand community, and distribute them ahead of a covid outbreak.

“CovidCard needs to be deployed before it is needed, at a time where case numbers and public concern for Covid-19 will likely be at an ebb.”

The card is a key element in pushing, mainly from business interests, for an urgent development of strategy on how to open the border safely to cushion the recessionary impact of the virus on the NZ economy, which has yet to be fully felt.

Fyfe, Business NZ chief executive Kirk Hope, former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark and the Chief Science Advisor to the previous government, Peter Gluckman, have all been visible faces in a lobbying effort that appears out of step with the sense of security among New Zealanders following the successful elimination of the virus within the country’s borders that is leading to low compliance with existing tracing systems.

The paper notes Singapore has abandoned phone-based tracing apps and “is now progressing a wearables strategy, very similar to that proposed by CovidCard”.

Trials suggest the CovidCard could shave an average of four days off the time taken to trace a contact, dramatically reducing the number of people who would be likely to be infected by a person who had yet to be identified as having Covid-19.

The paper also expresses doubts that the Ministry of Health and the highly devolved district health board system of public health service delivery could deliver the CovidCard and “they may struggle to drive the necessary change into regional contact tracing efforts”.

This article originally appeared on BusinessDesk. Their team publishes quality independent news, analysis and commentary on business, the economy and politics every day. Find out more.

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OPINIONPoliticsJuly 16, 2020

Judith Collins and the strong team

Toby Manhire

Editor-at-large

The new National Party leader enjoyed a very short political honeymoon, with two MP resignations landing this morning. Her challenge now is to pull off a superhuman repair job on the party’s core reputational strength, writes Toby Manhire.

It wasn’t quite a team of five million, but when Judith Collins took the stage in the old upper house at parliament just before 10 on Tuesday night, she had a 50-strong caucus jammed behind her. It was a scene that would scandalise much of the socially distanced world, but here it was a powerful symbolic tableau.

The National Party had its third leader-and-deputy pairing in the space of eight weeks. But it was standing together, united and upbeat. “As you can see here,” said Collins, gesturing at the crowd behind her, “this is our front bench”. A fresh breath. A twinkle in the eye. There would even be jokes. We knew this because Collins said “there would be jokes”.

There was unity and, with Michael Woodhouse jettisoned from the health spokesperson role, another clear message – a firm end to the agonising scandal around the leaking of private medical records relating to people in quarantine. A scandal which saw MP Hamish Walker’s political career come to an end, former National president Michelle Boag break her multifarious associations with the party and, now, Woodhouse lose a critical role. Under Collins, National would draw a line under the matter and move on. We know this because pretty much every National MP said “we have drawn a line under the matter and we’re moving on”.

But the moving on turned out to be a treadmill. For the second time this week, a National Party breakfast bombshell. Front-page splash-scoops are rare things in the digital age, but here it was from the Herald’s Audrey Young, in big, bold type: “Nikki Kaye quits”.

A highly impressive education minister, an incredibly conscientious and dedicated MP for Auckland Central, a breast cancer survivor, and someone liked and respected across party lines, Kaye had decided to go. She stressed she supported Collins and reckoned the party could yet win, but it was time. She had poured her energy into the Muller experiment. It didn’t work out. And now, still young at 40 years old, she’s taken a chance to live another life.

And that wasn’t the end of it. Swiftly on the heels of that high-profile departure, Amy Adams was un-un-resigning. She’d reversed her decision to stand down from parliament when Todd Muller rolled Simon Bridges, and after initially saying she’d be sticking around under Team Collins, she reverted this morning to her earlier decision as she, too – another very capable and admired former minister of the crown – announced she was done.

Nikki Kaye, Gerry Brownlee and Judith Collins, at the first press conference of Todd Muller’s leadership (Photo: Getty Images)

Rarely has a political honeymoon been so brief. Yesterday Collins undertook what seemed like several million broadcast interviews; you’d have been hard-pressed to find anyone in New Zealand who didn’t catch a clipped laugh or an arched eyebrow at some point through the day. But if a line had been drawn it was a messy smudge by this morning. Put it this way, just three days ago the top three in the National caucus – and a freshly arrived top three at that – were 1. Todd Muller. 2. Nikki Kaye. 3. Amy Adams.

So you certainly can’t accuse National of failing to rejuvenate. Of the top 20 at the term’s outset, 11 have quit parliament.

The National top 20 at the start of 2018

Bill English

Paula Bennett

Steven Joyce

Gerry Brownlee

Simon Bridges

Amy Adams

Jonathan Coleman

Chris Finlayson

Judith Collins

Michael Woodhouse

Nathan Guy

Nikki Kaye

Todd McClay

Paul Goldsmith

Louise Upston

Anne Tolley

David Carter

Nick Smith

Maggie Barry

Alfred Ngaro

In an attempt to draw another line, Collins brought forward her reshuffle announcement this morning. The most interesting part of that was not just a place on the front bench for Todd Muller, from whom nothing has been heard since last week, but the elevation of two critical engineers of the coup that saw Muller replace Bridges. Chris Bishop is now ranked seventh, while Nicola Willis takes the education role from Kaye.

The pair, both former National staffers, are very much at the progressive edge of the party. With fears of a right-wing religious conservative thinking faction growing in power within National, Collins has sought to signal that the party is still a broad – not fundamentalist – church. Asked today whether the departure of Kaye, who wore her liberal convictions proudly, meant defeat for the liberal wing, Collins said: “I’d like to find someone more liberal than Chris Bishop.”

But the core problem for Collins and National now is the damage to the party’s reputational cornerstones. Remember the definitely-not-Eminem-soundtracked boat ad, the “team that’s working” smoothly through the water? The National pitch of competence is predicated on unity, discipline, stability and predictability. The last 55 days have witnessed the utter antithesis of that. I jotted down a list of the people who have been propelled up and down the ranks of the National Party in that time. There are a lot of names. Many of them are in both columns.

The Labour Party had to deal with upheaval and change in the last furlong before the 2017 election, to tear up its advertising and start again. But that seems almost piffling compared to the National Party task now.

Twenty days ago, the party unveiled its hoardings for the 2020 election, with leader Todd Muller urging voters to back “a strong, competent National-led government”. This is the hoarding:

After such a calamitous few days, the anguish for National is not just that one of the figures photographed has quit the leadership and the other quit politics altogether. It’s those first two bold words, upon which everything else hangs.