This appeared last week:
COVIDSafe app didn’t find contacts
· 2:00AM January 19, 2021
The federal government’s COVIDSafe app did not uncover contacts of COVID-19 cases in the recent holiday outbreaks.
This period includes the South Australian Parafield outbreak starting in mid November, clusters in NSW on the Northern Beaches and Berala, and community transmission cases in Victoria.
The Australian contacted each state and territory to find out the usage of the app.
In NSW a health spokesperson said experience to date in NSW had shown that the COVIDSafe app may be most useful where interviews with contact tracers have not been successful in identifying contacts. “To date, it has not been necessary to use the app in these latest clusters,” the spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Victoria said that from 14 November, out of the 14 cases that had the app, it identified zero new contacts through the COVIDSafe data.
A Queensland Health spokesperson said the app had been used twice since the pandemic began to complement contact tracing efforts and there has been one contact identified through the app to date, and no positive cases. Both these occasions were pre-October 2020.
A South Australia health spokesperson said: “The Communicable Disease Control Branch are able to access data from the COVIDSafe app to assist with contact tracing, however so far this hasn’t been activated in positive cases we have had in South Australia.”
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Questions remain. The app may have been downloaded by 7.28 million people, but how many actively open the app daily? Checking in at venues with QR codes seems to be becoming more the norm. And should the COVIDSafe app strictly adhere to the 1.5 metre rule given the existence of aerosol transmissions of longer distance?
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The full article is here:
Calling time on the COVIDSafe app
The COVIDSafe app has delivered an abject lesson that with computer solutions, complexity isn’t better than simplicity. The Australian today revealed that state and territory health departments have been barely accessing data from it over summer.
Government Services Minister Stuart Robert and his team did the right thing exploring adapting Singapore’s TraceTogether app to unravel the transmission of coronavirus in the community. The app enables phones to sense the distance to other phones using Bluetooth signals.
The Singapore government rendered the code for the TraceTogether app open source and free to adapt. It was a starting point for developing COVIDSafe. When the app launched in April, it was one of the key pillars in the federal response to the virus. Prime Minister Scott Morrison described it as enabling us to get back to relative normality.
The app went well at first with six million downloads in the first month, and I was among those in the media wishing it well. Any weapon against this lethal virus was an important shot in the locker.
But problems arose. The Bluetooth detection functionality on iPhones would not work reliably unless the COVIDSafe app was loaded in the foreground. Different phone models had different Bluetooth signal strengths, so the software needed to know the brand and model of the detected handset to calculate its distance based on signal strength.
The rule of 1.5 metres apart for 15 minutes for an encounter seemed arbitrary given the possibility of infection by aerosol droplets over longer distances, and lately, infections arising from short encounters (such as the recent infections at BWS in Berala, Sydney).
The take-up of the app (7.28 million downloads) fell short of the 40 per cent target originally envisaged by the government, deemed to make COVIDSafe app matching a success.
Lots more of comment here:
So basically it seems that there have been relatively few wins with the app despite the Government push.
It seems that thus far the use of QR codes is proving more valuable than the app and this probably explains why Singapore has added QR functionality to its app in recent times.
Maybe that might be a useful way forward?
David.
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