The System Works

Welcome, disease-aware reader, as this week I talk about how the systems and processes we've put in place during the last 3 years of this pandemic appear to have worked.

Yes, I'm afraid that means it's not all good news. We have some visitors over from the UK this week, and they seem to have brought something less than ideal with them: a COVID infection. But there's joy to be had in everything, and the joy this brings is the ability to test out some of the technology the world has developed to detect and track infections, and show that it actually works as advertised.

During the pandemic, my employer was good enough to offer all its employees free COVID testing equipment from Cue Health. This isn't simply a load of those disposable LFTs; it's a full-on nucleic acid amplification test which you can do in 20 minutes in the comfort of your own home. In less scientific terms, that means it's more accurate and more sensitive than the test you buy at the chemist's.

We've been using these things for a while, and it's come in very handy to test us while we're feeling ill, when we want to travel, or when we want to go to events. But we'd never seen a positive test on the thing, so it's hard to know if it actually works or not; my suggestion that they put a sachet of COVID in the box so you can prove to yourself that the test works has been met with a shake of the head by everyone I've mentioned it to. So this week's COVID infections have allowed us to show that the little white Cue Health machine does actually work, and it means I can reliably report that the only person remaining COVID-negative in our house is currently me, but I'm not sure how long that will last.

Having a COVID-positive California resident means we could test out California's exposure notification technology too. California has opted into the exposure notification system built into iOS and Android, the backend of which was built by someone who used to work for me at Google as it happens. So Helen dutifully reported her positive test via her phone last night, and this morning, for the first time ever, I got an alert indicating that I might have been exposed to the virus.

The good news is, so far no-one seems to be particularly ill here. Anyway, it's good to see that all this technology actually works. Wish us luck as we navigate this latest batch of COVIDity!