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Technological inventions allow for the most interesting and useful communication through specially designed apps meant to alert people to potential health threats and directing them to temporarily isolate to ensure that their infectious state does not have the opportunity to communicate infections to others in the community. In a country with a steadily rising case load through an outbreak of a highly contagious virus like the Delta strain, those communications result in a whole range of people been informed they must self-isolate.

In the United Kingdom that has resulted in supermarkets finding themselves in short supply on their shelves, and gas stations forced to close up shop. The official health app contacted hundreds of thousands of workers, instructing them to isolate following contact with someone else who has symptoms of COVID-19. Photographs of supermarket empty shelves have featured in British newspapers, front page, above the fold, with "PINGDEMIC" in big, bold lettering.

Government, according to its Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng was "very concerned" with the situation. Britain has seen COVID cases rising to 50,000 on a daily basis with hundreds of thousands of people placed out of commission after having been "pinged" by the contact-tracing app of the National Health Service, instructing them to prepare for a ten-day isolation period.

Staffing reductions have resulted and chaos has arisen from the fact that insufficient personnel can be relied upon to conduct the most basic and important of public services; distributing food and pumping gas. The situation that has arisen impacts food supplies, transport, supermarkets, hospitality, manufacturing and media. In sheer frustration people have taken to deleting the app from their cellphones.

A lack of fuel has forced BP to close a number of their gas stations, resulting from a shortfall in available truck drivers thanks to COVID isolation. Specifically bottled water, soft drinks, salad and meat products appear to be the items most in short supply on store shelves. Food supply chains were "right on the edge of failing" according to one meat industry body, reflecting absences caused by COVID-19 aggravating a critical shortage of labour already in existence.

Close to 620,000 people had been instructed to isolate in England and Wales in the weeks leading up to July 14, according to official data, thanks to the app. An app that government ministers characterize as important in countering the spread of the coronavirus which has ended the lives of approximately 129,000 people in Britain, representing the seventh-highest death toll in the world.

For the past several weeks infections have risen sharply in Britain. The vaccination program has succeeded in inoculating 88 percent of adults with one vaccine dose, and over 69 percent with two doses. That has had the desired result of diminishing the link between infections and deaths, where daily fatalities are now ebbing.