I forget where I saw the documentary, but it was a young man who once wanted to find out what it was all about with the many public AIDS testing stations that seem to be found in cities all over the African continent. The procedure for determining whether someone is positive or negative at the end, if I remember correctly, is the following: Two tests are done to be sure. But if one test is positive and the other negative, they don't do another test, but the answers on the questionnaire decide the result. In these test centres, people are asked about their sex life, and if they give information about having changing partners or not living in a permanent relationship, etc., they are considered "positive". Presumably this is because the series of tests could be drawn out ad infinitum and they could always show different, contradictory results. At some point, the rule was also introduced here that if it is so, then one simply decides according to life situation. This is not without a certain humour if one is not affected by a test.
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That is awful. I am told the COVID questionnaire for signing up for a vaccine involves a lot of personal information that is somewhat humbling to answer. Being asked about your sexual history as a condition for determining if you have AIDS is not very scientific. I can only deduce that the answers are also being used to support a researcher's data charts, which will likely be used to promote funding for their career, helpful or not in combating the virus. If anything, it reveals they are very interested in collecting vulnerable information about your personal life, and less interested in finding proof for the actual virus within a person's body.
Not scientific at all. But in the end, science has it's clear limits and that we can see in this example, that testing those things (like DNA) leaves the realm of matter and enters the space of idea.
Yes, data is the new gold.
I wonder how many of my data is flying around in companies and insurances and whatnot, of which I have forgotten to ever have given my figures and numbers. It'd be interesting to see that in materials.
How do you know about the vaccination questionnaire?
I don't know much, only what I have heard from my folks.
In my state, and many others, you go onto a government website. First they ask you lots of questions. After you finish the survey, it informs you to wait for the server to process your turn, and this can take 20 minutes to an hour. Theirs kicked them out because too many people were online trying to sign up. (Mind you, they are senior citizens, and he told me this later, because he thought he was using the computer wrong, just doing the "easy sign up" like the news told him to do.) If you succeed in getting an appointment, it gives you a number in the thousands, representing how many appointments in the queue have to be scheduled before you.