Spend a vision with me: Covid-19, how safe is your DNA

I am into sports, football mainly with some recent interest in indoor cricket, and I do use some data analysis to illustrate some points on data (1)(2)(3). So, I was surprised to see who the EPL is partnering with to come up with a covid19-passport that would allow people back in stadia: Prenetics (4)(5). And for those who are not aware, Prenetics is behind circledna, offered all over at Watsons (6).

I blogged about Prenetics two years ago (7) where they collaborated with Prudential to offer an insurance product that offers personalised advice based on your dna. While prudential assured users they did not keep the DNA, guess who did… Prenetics.

So what does that have to do with Covid-19?

I am running a small poll on linked-in. Some countries are going into relaxing their “lock-downs” by introducing/further enforcing contact-tracing. What this means is that some data created by people will be made available, usually to authorities. The 2 major methods are via location (GPS) or proximity (blue-tooth), and the poll is about which of these 2 are people less uncomfortable with (8). The third idea is a health passport.

GPS tracing

Your location is captured 24/7. In order for the system to be effective, the data is transferred back to a central database. So technically, if someone is tested positive, the list of people who were at the same place and time with that person can be extracted and contacted.

Bluetooth tracing

Your device captures data from people close to you (and your data is captured by the devices of people close to you). If someone is tested positive, the device is surrendered to the authorities and the people who data was captured are contacted.

Health Passport

A third idea, which is what the premier league is using, is the idea of health passports. “According to Lasarow, the web-based system would require fans to scan their health passport information, by way of a QR code, upon access to a venue in order to prove their Covid-19 test is valid and has also produced a negative result.” (4)

First of all, as I pointed out (9), the tests are designed to test whether there is enough evidence that someone is covid-19 positive; if there is not enough evidence, the person is not deemed covid-19 positive; not positive does not mean negative. It simply means there is not enough evidence to say the person has been infected with the virus.

Secondly, a test is valid at a point in time. You extract samples from me now for the test. Let’s assume I am isolated until the results come out. The results will indicate whether, when the test was carried out, there was enough evidence to say I was covid-19 positive. This test is valid for a point in time in the past. Since I have isolated myself, then chances are the same status is valid since I isolated myself (unless for example I was at too early a stage to be detected, and even if I am not further exposed, the virus replicates in my body and becomes detectable).

Now I carry this result on my “health passport”, and go to the stadium and “prove” I can be safely allowed in. The key points are

how much time has passed from the test to me entering the stadium
what have I been up to, where have I been, who have I been in close proximity with in the time between the test and me entering the stadium.

This is not as risk-free as many would like. All the passport says is that: at a point in time in the past (I am sure there will be a time-based validity), my test did not indicate that I was covid-19 positive. And this applies to everyone else in the stadium.

To me, the health passport, used in isolation, is insufficient, especially since we know so little about the virus, the incubation period, the contagious period, what factors affect these (diet, temperature, activities, behaviour…).

A health passport would be good if it indicated immunity to covid-19. At this point, it does not.

So, the EPL’s current health passport offers some cover, anywhere from a blanket that keeps your feet uncovered, to a fig leaf. This is because all your activities, all the places you have been and the people in whose proximity you have been in, are all not recorded by this “health passport”. That’s precisely why there are trac(k)ing approaches.

Now, if you add to that the Peltzman effect (10), that is people who now think they are safe tend to take more risks than earlier, this makes going to stadia to watch the EPL a bit scary (fortunately I am a plastic fan from Singapore).

However this is not what this blog is actually about.

What truly scares me is that it is Prenetics behind the initiative.

The covid19 tests are not done by Prenetics, they are done by a third-party lab, the doctors’ laboratory (11). Prenetics simply allows the person to confirm his/her identity, matching the person who took the test to the person entering the stadium. Basically, that’s an IT integration job, not that of a company that deals in DNA.

So what does Prenetics gain from this? If it was only the US$4.8m deal with the EPL (5), I wouldn’t be bothered, but what is left is. Prenetics is in the business of collecting DNA samples. Once the tests are done, who owns the samples? What happens to them? Is the DNA extracted? What is done with it?

It is not unheard of for medical samples to be used for purposes other than the main one they were collected for. In fact, donated blood that is not used (blood doesn’t have that long shelf-life) (12). The unused blood may be used for research purposes.

My fear is that our data (remember, the way the health passport works is that your identity is ties to the sample and to the results) would be used to extract DNA and this can be used somehow – for example insurance companies would love to get their hands on your DNA, and even learn your genetic predisposition to some illnesses even when you don’t. When someone gives a sample for covid-19 testing, I would assume that’s all they’d like the labs to do with the sample.

Ok, so if the health passport is so bad, what is the solution?

There are many solutions, many countries have their own tracing apps, apple/google have their own, a flexible and useful one is goPassport (different from the health passport used by the EPL). GoPassport works across international borders and combines a few methods, including interfacing with local apps, and provides a comprehensive risk assessment from various sources such as tests, other measurements, movements…

If you want to know more about goPassport, please contact Francesca.goh@alphazetta.ai or Alec.gardner@alphazetta.ai , do mention me so I can claim a few drinks from them if they get a deal out of it 😊

Spend a vision with me

Wednesday 24 June 2020

Covid-19, how safe is your DNA

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