Virtually nobody in America is using an Apple-Google COVID-19 contact tracing app

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In the early months of the pandemic, engineers from Google, Apple and a handful of other tech companies got together to build a system to notify people if they’d come in contact with someone who had tested positive for COVID-19, but virtually nobody in America today is using an Apple-Google contact tracing (exposure notification) app.

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The tech giants managed to build and launch the “exposure notification” framework in months, a previously unheard-of level of collaboration for the rivals.

It was a “land speed record for software development,” said Myoung Cha, who worked on the project as Apple’s head of strategic health initiatives. He left Apple and became president and chief strategic officer at San Francisco-based health-care start-up Carbon Health in June.

But nearly two years later… adoption of the system is still far behind what its creators and proponents envisioned. More than 20 states don’t use it at all, including large states like Florida and Texas… Even in states where millions have activated the notifications, only a fraction of people who test positive for the virus report it to the Apple and Google system. California’s system, for example, has been activated on more than 15 million devices, but only about 3 percent of the nearly 3.9 million cases reported since launch were logged in the system…

According to Cha, the federal government has repeatedly missed opportunities to get more people to adopt exposure notifications. “The Biden administration, when they came into power, put almost all their chips into the vaccines as their silver bullet to beat the virus,” Cha said. “I think that was strategically the biggest mistake.”

Karen L. Howard, the director of science and technology assessment at the Government Accountability Office, said that she believes more states would have adopted the apps if there was more evidence that they were augmenting contact tracing efforts. But so far, the data is “murky.”

“We don’t have the data to say whether or not they’re effective or could be effective,” said Howard, who co-authored a September study on the benefits and challenges of the apps… “You can’t know whether a notification occurred at a time when you might have been pretty well protected versus not as well protected,” Howard said. “And in addition the states don’t know who downloaded it, where they are located.”

Via: The Washington Post