Tale of Two Counties
Rural counties could be the safest places in America
Parag Khanna: Six predictions for a new world order:
Countries that have accepted the rhythms of shelter-in-place policies and deployed contact-tracing technologies may be able to isolate pockets of exposure through strict quarantines, but poor and densely populated countries will remain especially unprepared and vulnerable.
If Khanna had said “counties” instead of “countries”, he’d be describing what’s starting in Telluride, CO: a couple of part-time Telluride residents are using their day job, United Biomedical’s C19 testing company, to rescue their beloved part time home. Wife & husband Co-CEOs are donating antibody tests for all the residents of San Miguel County, CO. Tellmed.org press release:
“When we reported this in our county meeting yesterday, the entire team cried.”
(Susan Lilly, 970–729–2028, susanl@sanmiguelsheriff.org, 3/19/20)
Telluride’s easy to isolate, at the end of a box canyon, so it’s a perfect pilot for a county-wide C19 lockdown, with all full-time residents tested and traced, and vacationers screened before entry to the resort.
COVID19 Best Practices: a DMV for Health Licensing
Every driver is required to be certified as safe, ready to present four credentials from trusted authorities:
Current Driver’s License
Current insurance policy
Current registration
Current emissions test
Why shouldn’t local governments test everybody and issue credentials for their current C19 status? The only barrier is cost, but the economics of ski area revenue and property values mean that any amount spent on C19 remediation is reasonable.
Who’s allowed to come into town?
No infection and no exposure.
Recovered.
Who’s excluded?
Infected.
Symptomatic, but not tested.
Exposed, but not infected.
Of course, Coronavirus “Current” credentials have to be a lot more current than driver and vehicle credentials.
The Telluride Boarding Pass
United Biomedical’s C19 generous one-time testing is a start, but C19 contaminant status is fast-changing, with multiple data points for each human, every day, so each person needs to share their status with multiple trusted parties every day, from the hotel to the lift operators. It’s not just “Papers, please”, it’s an electronic call & response like the boarding pass that got you to Denver:
Hotel Reception Desk: “May I connect with your Telluride Boarding Pass?”
Fortunately, the data architecture and methods are as well established as those behind your digital boarding pass. A Telluride Boarding Pass system would include Telluride’s C19 trusted authorities and dependent parties: credential issuers, the C19 test credentials they issue, the relying parties(hotels, pubs, parties and lift operators), the digital wallets they use and the digital handshakes they exchange.
None of the parts of the Telluride Boarding Pass system is difficult:
1️⃣ Require use of any of the many Appstore wallets the County trusts.
2️⃣ Test everyone on CO Hwy 145 arriving from west of the airport.
3️⃣ COVID19 test credentials from trusted sources.
4️⃣ A “Fineburg credential” in categories 4–5.*
5️⃣ Isolate or deny entry to people in Fineburg categories 1–3: I, S & E*
6️⃣ Contact tracing required as a probability rating.
_____________________________________
*Dr. Fineberg’s 5 “ISENR”categories:
1] Infected.
2] Symptomatic, not tested.
3] Exposed, not infected.
4] No infection and no exposure.
5] Recovered.
There are more parts to a full Telluride solution, but there are currently 254 experts taking care of that.
The real benefit here is not simply letting you into the hotel, bar, restaurant or on the lift. It’s the deep peace of mind knowing you’re in one of the most isolated and safe places in North America: the literal meaning of “vacation” is to vacate the demanding life back home, suddenly far more demanding.
A Telluride Boarding Pass is an Immunity Passport to help us vacation in a safer, friendlier, quieter place. But only safer if all our passports are based on frequently-updated assertions in our Digital Health Certificate, including contact tracing.
Rural Counties: Your ride’s ready, maybe in May.
I’m a cheerleader for a team of 254 of the world’s most qualified experts that’s laser-focused on the methods and taxonomies to issue trusted credential claims RE data and metadata resulting from the kinds of tests underway in San Miguel County. At the highest, most abstract level, the process looks like this:
Their COVID19 digital identity project will be discussed and improved at the 50th Internet Identity Workshop remote conference next week, 4/28–30. I urge you to sign up to discover and add to the consensus.
In addition to assertions RE test data, I’ve suggested that assertions should include which of Dr. Harvey Fineberg’s 5 ISENR categories describe a person’s current status, from the 4/1 New England Journal of Medicine, Ten Weeks to Crush the Curve, “a game-changer in restarting parts of the economy more quickly and safely.”
1️⃣ Infected.
2️⃣ Symptomatic, not tested.
3️⃣ Exposed, not infected.
4️⃣ No infection and no exposure.
5️⃣ Recovered.
After the San Miguel County model is proven, the obvious next step is to replicate the program in other resort counties, like Eagle County, CO, which had early cases, and Whistler Blackcomb, because the British Columbia government is already using these methods and wallets in its Orgbook BC system, “a searchable public directory of open verifiable data about organizations legally registered in BC”.
Resort counties are the obvious places to start because each is an ideal case: many resorts are some distance from populated areas, with few roads in, so “port of entry” testing is practical.
Most of them are also ideal for a crowdfunding appeal: an easily-identified, prosperous, and motivated community of concerned stakeholders, supporting a low-cost solution, relative to the donors’ resources. Multiple Kickstarter campaigns could rescue North American counties one at a time in parallel, starting with resort areas and their many $billion of real estate. Resort operators and realtors will be anxious to have a season next season.
Why counties and not towns or cities?
To a virus, a rural county is a moat around a concentration of delicious hosts. Typically, there are only a few roads into town, so just a few ports of entry to monitor.
Veterans’ Benefits
Remote-working Pandemic survivors will surely be as motivated as were WWII veterans to flee to the country, so the pandemic is the catalyst that Steve Case and his Rise of the Rest project, sadly, needed.
The Grinnell Model for rural Remote Natives
If you’re remote-officing from your home in NYC, you might be unexpectedly tempted to move to a place like Grinnell, IA, if Poweshiek County implements the San Miguel County model.
Your Grinnell Boarding Pass could be issued or updated by medical professionals working out of one of 4 port of entry RVs, on US 6 at Ferguson Road to the west and 50th Street to the east and on Route146 north of the airport and north of Sugar Creek, just far enough from the golf course.
There are thousands of counties like Poweshiek surrounding great towns like Grinnell, many of which are also college towns. These are the counties out in the country where veterans of the Great Pandemic might settle, as their great-grandparents did, in the new suburbs after WWII, for all the same reasons.
The work in progress: 254 of the world’s most skilled Identity/Privacy experts will be online at the Internet Identity Workshop from 4/28–30, and they’re eager for your input.
There are many great resources linked to from each of the following:
SSI Covid Test Results: Digital Issuance, Presentation & Verification Protocol
COVID-19: Rebooting Public Trust: Launching the Covid Credentials Initiative
Schemas for COVID-19 Credentials
Use Cases for COVID-19 Credentials
Connect.me phone wallets: iPhone, Google Play
