Skip to content

Archives

Links for 2021-05-13

  • Facebook moderator: ‘Every day was a nightmare’ – BBC News

    Wow, this is not OK — Facebook are massively mistreating these contract workers.

    “Every day was a nightmare,” she said, adding that the support given was “insufficient.” Facebook says psychological help is available to all its moderators 24 hours a day, but Isabella claims its wellness coaches are not qualified psychiatrists. “I was seeing the wellness team but didn’t feel I got the support I needed. I can’t say I left work feeling relieved or knowing I could go home and have a good night’s sleep – that’s not possible,” she added. “It would follow me home. I could just be watching TV at home and think back to one of the horrible, really graphic tickets.”
    “Wellness coaches” are not sufficient — this is exploitation.

    (tags: facebook ptsd exploitation trauma moderators moderation covalen violence)

  • The epidemiological impact of the NHS COVID-19 App

    Nature paper on the UK contact notification app’s impact on the COVID-19 pandemic:

    Here we investigated the impact of the NHS COVID-19 app for England and Wales, from its launch on 24 September 2020 through to the end of December 2020. It was used regularly by approximately 16.5 million users (28% of the total population), and sent approximately 1.7 million exposure notifications: 4.4 per index case consenting to contact tracing. We estimated that the fraction of app-notified individuals subsequently showing symptoms and testing positive (the secondary attack rate, SAR) was 6.0%, comparable to the SAR for manually traced close contacts. We estimated the number of cases averted by the app using two complementary approaches. Modelling based on the notifications and SAR gave 284,000 (108,000-450,000), and statistical comparison of matched neighbouring local authorities gave 594,000 (317,000-914,000). Roughly one case was averted for each case consenting to notification of their contacts. We estimated that for every percentage point increase in app users, the number of cases can be reduced by 0.8% (modelling) or 2.3% (statistical analysis). These findings provide evidence for continued development and deployment of such apps in populations that are awaiting full protection from vaccines.

    (tags: covid-19 contact-tracing apps pandemics npis)

Comments closed