Freedom means deleting the app

Millions are deleting the app.  Seeing how people are being pushed into isolating by their apps, not surprisingly, millions are deleting them.  Do a fake sign in.  Just take a picture and delete it.  Kids on Twitter call it the ‘clotshot’….  The sleeping are waking.

Front Desk writes

Factories, hospitals and pubs struggle as staff pinged by Test and Trace app

One in five pub and cafe workers is thought to be self-isolating, hospitals are struggling with staff shortages and factories, including that of Rolls-Royce cars, are on the brink of having to close temporarily because so many employees have been pinged.

All this, remember, before “Freedom Day” has even arrived and people start piling into nightclubs, stadiums and festivals, or just standing at the bar in the local.

With the highly contagious Delta variant spreading at will and Britain testing more people than ever for Covid, it’s perhaps not a surprise, but it is a rather big problem.

There are, in theory, some tweaks the Government could make. Bill Gardner reports on rare cases of people who believe the app has marked them as close contacts through the walls of their homes.

Officials are looking at making the app less sensitive, but that could take weeks. From August 16, the fully vaccinated will be exempt from self-isolation, but in the meantime, millions could be pinged, perhaps multiple times.

There is, though, something odd about the way this wave of pings is being discussed. The app is, of course, doing exactly the job it was supposed to do. Cases are rising rapidly, more people are being hospitalised and deaths are slowly creeping back up. Self-isolation, done properly, should be keeping the number of infections down.

The assumption behind lifting the requirements on August 16 is that enough people will have been fully vaccinated, or, at this rate, infected and recovered. At which point, the number of pings should be falling anyway.

The next month, though, could be rather less than fun.

Telegraph Front Desk