Day 493 of self-isolation - Pingdemic

Pingdemic

Ping is a program, available in Windows and Linux, that reaches out to another computer and says "Are you there?". It's very useful.

But civilians are using the word in a different sense. When the NHS app tells you thst you've been close enough to an infected person, it tells you so, and they're calling that a "ping".

We've got 50,000 new cases per day, so the number of infected people is around half a million. And so more than 600,000 people have been pinged.

If they all self-isolate for ten days, that's a big chunk of the active work force. And they all lose pay as a result. So people are removing the app from their phones - no app, no ping.

The problem is, the "test, trace, isolate" works when there's a small number of cases, but when the pandemic gets out of control, it's less useful.

What's the answer? There is no answer.

Here's me pinging the Google DNS server.