Readers may recall that I’ve been talking about fighting COVID via dog-style RFID chips in the necks of American humans (see RFID chips in the necks of college students for example and #Science proves that I was right (about the need for RFID chips in humans for COVID-19 surveillance) )
A friend who is expecting to adopt a puppy told me about a recent advance in the RFID chip world: Merck’s Home Again TempScan ($12 or $40 installed; the reader is $67) and competitors.
This would be perfect for a cower-in-place population that has happily surrendered its freedoms for what it hopes will be a slightly lower and/or slower COVID-19 death rate! Inexpensive sensors all over our built infrastructure can not only monitor who is getting near whom, but also whether anyone has a fever!
Related:
- https://www.surepetcare.com/en-gb/bio-thermo (explains more about the technology)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchip_implant_(human) (never need to carry keys to get into your house, start your car, etc.!)
I’m surprised Apple hasn’t yet built hourly body-temperature check capability into either the Apple Watch or AirPods. It seems inevitable; the sensors are cheap and the info would go really well with all the other health metrics they’re already tracking.
When I read about people “jumping the line” in hospitals to receive the vaccine, with all the nasty Hobbesian social sequelae, I couldn’t believe that someone hadn’t sold them a $10 color-coded bracelet that showed exactly what tier people were in. You test this in hospitals. Nobody can jump the line if they’re tagged and the bracelets can be reprogrammed for future plagues. If we can spend trillions on stimulus checks, why can’t we cheaply manufacture (right here in the USA!) a bracelet that anyone can wear, for this vaccine rollout and all the future vaccine rollouts, and ship them to everyone in the USA?
It’s not quite as good as the RFID chip, but it avoids the problem of convincing people to receive the chip injection.
The other benefit is unambiguous and virtually instantaneous updates to the rollout statistics. Even if a vaccine requires 4 doses, you can indicate that in just two bits. This bracelet would only require a very tiny and very cheap computer to store all the relevant data. This all goes back to your idea about personalized health records. You can put it on a chip, sure, but the conspiracy theorists (and presumably people who don’t like needles and injections, or won’t accept anything inside their body they don’t want) will hate the RFID idea. Instead you wear it all on a biometric bracelet that talks to your phone, PC, whatever, and keeps track of your status. Cheap but good.