Aotearoa/NZ: Tips for how to remember if you were at a 'location of interest' & if so then when.
Nathan Heazlewood
Principal Consultant- GIS Business Consulting at Eagle Technology
The August 2021 Covid-19 Outbreak in Aotearoa/New Zealand has rapidly generated a huge number of 'locations of interest'. In many ways this is a great thing because it shows how good our contract tracing processes are to be able to track back to these locations, in many countries around the world Covid is so widespread that this would be impossible.
However with so many locations identified it can be difficult for people to identify a location of interest that they have visited or to remember the specific time when they were there. Here are some tips that might help prompt your memory if you find yourself needing to do this.
As Dr Ashley Bloomfield has mentioned: even if you have been at a 'location of interest' you are only a 'close contact' if you were there at a similar time to a 'confirmed case': we don't want to burden the system, nor individuals themselves, with being thought to be a close contact when they weren't at a location of interest at the specific time of interest. Hopefully the tips below might help with that:
Checklist of tips (these items are then expanded below)
1. Covid Tracer App or a paper-based diary
The first place to start of course is your NZ Covid Tracer App (if you have been using it). The diary function of the app will show you were you have scanned in and what date and time. To find out how to use the diary function, or if you are not already using the app then more details can be found here: https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-resources-and-tools/nz-covid-tracer-app
One benefit of using the App is that the Ministry of Health can send automated messages to you if they identify that somewhere you have scanned in to becomes a 'location of interest'.
Some people may also have used their own pen & paper diary to record similar details that they can use to check against the locations of interest.
Unfortunately many kiwis haven't been as assiduous with scanning in as we should have been (having been many months without a community case it is easy to get complacent). So what follows is some other tips for how to try to fill in the gaps of memory to retrace your steps.
2. MoH Locations of Interest Webpage
The Ministry of Health is publishing regular updates of Locations of Interest to this webpage:
It may pay to put this list onto your 'favourites' or 'bookmarks' in your browser and to refer to it often for updates. Alternatively here is a shortcut link that might be easier to remember or to type in: https://tinyurl.com/nzlocationsofinterest
3. Check your receipts
If you haven't been scanning in and need to try to remember where you have been and when then if you have kept receipts they can be a useful clue to business names and dates and times when you purchased something. Of course if you went into a shop and didn't make a purchase then this will not work, but if you can build up a 'picture' of things that you did on a particular day then that can help to jog your memory, and receipts might help with that.
4. Check your bank details
You can use your on-line banking statements to track back to purchases that you have made. Unfortunately however many on-line banking statements only provide you with the date of a transaction and not the time. The date and business name may be sufficient to jog your memory, but if you need to get the precise time then you can contact your bank or credit card company to request the precise time of the transaction: however be prepared for a long wait on the line, which I suspect will get more busy at present with many people requesting this information (maybe the banks could add that data to what is on-line already?)
5. Ask people that you were with during or before or after a time that you need to be specific about.
Maybe you were with someone else at a particular time of interest and they may remember where you were. Alternatively around the date and time of interest maybe on a certain morning you think you went shopping somewhere and then met a friend in the afternoon? If that friend has an accurate record that they can match to meeting up with you then you may be able to more accurately recall what you were doing that morning.
6. Check automated systems where dates and times are recorded (phone call records, email, calendar apps, diet apps, social media, messaging apps).
If you had a work meeting or a dental appointment in your calendar and can use that to work out what you were doing on a certain date then that can help to aid your memory.
Also if you are concerned about whether you were at a 'location of interest' at 3pm last Thursday but your email shows that you sent an email at that time (and you remember being at your desk to send it) then that can help to rule out certain dates and times.
There are many other apps (text message times/phone call log times) where you might have posted something that indicates the date and time that you were active on that app. These can in some cases rule you out of being at a location of interest at a certain time, or help you to remember what you were doing on a certain day at a certain time.
7. MoH Map page of Locations of Interest and other map options
Sometimes having a map of locations can be a good way for some people to be able to determine if they were at a location (for example if you know you went to a cafe in a certain suburb but you don't really know the name of that specific cafe).
The MoH has a map of locations here that can help by showing suburbs and dots on the map that you can click on to see the names of the businesses and other details:
There is also this map from Abley that allows you filter what is shown on the map to specific dates: see https://emergency-eaglegis.hub.arcgis.com/pages/covid-19/ or https://abley.com/abley-insights/nz-covid-19-locations-of-interest-map/ (note: this map is an 'unofficial' copy of the MoH data and is updated slightly behind the official webpages).
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8. Use geographic tools to double check locations or fill in gaps in your memory
Some people recall things better with pictures. Maybe you recall visiting a cafe in a certain suburb but cannot recall for certain either by the name of the cafe or by looking at a map. Perhaps using a 'streetview' facility to look at the outside of a cafe you are not sure about might help you to recall if it is the right one?
If you have a 'location of interest' that you are concerned about but not sure then you can use map tools such as Auckland Council's Geomaps to search for the address of that location of interest to access more information about it.
If you use the search tools or zoom tools to zoom in to a region of interest and then click on the little yellow person symbol and 'drop' that person onto the map then a 'streetview' image will be displayed at the bottom of the map: you can move the image around to see a shop or cafe or whatever from the outside. *Note: images are not always 100% up-to-date but generally they are useful.
9. Filtering and Sorting on the MoH Locations of Interest Webpage
When you first open the MoH Locations of Interest webpage the list of locations is currently being sorted with the 'updated' column in descending date order (i.e. the most recently identified/altered locations are at the top). This is useful in some respects because it means that if you are checking this table frequently then the new information is at the top and you can check down until you start recognising lines that you have already checked, or if you check it once every day then you can use that 'updated' column to just check for todays updates.
However sometimes you might want to get a different view of this information. For example: perhaps you remember that you went on a shopping trip to several locations a week ago and have heard from someone that there may be locations of interest in the suburb that you visited, so you want to check the table sorted by 'date when exposure event took place' (which is different from the 'date updated' in the table above), so that you can check all of the locations of interest on the date that you made that shopping trip. To help with that it is worth noting that you can 'click' on the title of the columns in the table to sort by those columns. Note the little triangle next to the title 'Day' in the table below: that indicates that that column is the one being sorted and which 'direction' it is being sorted in.
If you want to sort in the reverse order then just 'click' on 'Day' again and the direction of the sorting will be reversed, and the little arrow will point upwards:
Another tool to help you focus what you are looking for on the MoH Locations of Interest table is the 'Search Locations' tool. With this you can put in a business name or address or suburb name and find specific records. This can be useful if you know about a specific location of interest (maybe someone has mentioned a location in your suburb) and you want to find the precise date and time of concern. For example if you search for 'Countdown' then you get results like this:
HOWEVER! A word of warning that this search requires you to know the name and spelling of things exactly otherwise your search might not give you the right results. A simple example is if you mispelled 'Count Down' (i.e. with a gap between two words):
You can also search for street addresses or suburb names, a word of warning that kiwis have different understandings of the boundaries of suburbs so if you do a search involving a particular suburb you might not get the right results: boundaries between Remuera and Meadowbank or Mount Eden and Sandringham for example are understood differently by different people- watch out for this if you are searching by suburb.
One way to safeguard against this type of problem if you are wanting to search by suburb is to search for a 'suburb' name, plus the names of the surrounding suburbs to be on the safe side.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Some locations of interest have multiple different 'times of interest' (for the same location) so make sure when you are looking through the list or searching that you don't only look at a subset of the records:
Kia kaha, we WILL get through this!
Any opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily reflect the views of my employer or any other party.
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