People Are Finally Downloading COVID-19 Exposure Notification Apps. Will They Make a Difference?

In the early weeks of the U.S. COVID-19 outbreak this spring, technologists pushed forward an idea to help bring the spread of the new virus under control: smartphones could notify users who had potentially been exposed to others with COVID-19, transforming millions of devices into the world’s most efficient army of public health contact tracers. Big tech got on board, with Apple and Google jointly releasing software in May that enabled state and national public health departments to build such “exposure notification” (EN) apps. But as the pandemic burned through the country, slow development, sparse public outreach and suspicion of the new software from both states and users stymied the effort for months. Over the summer, only six states released apps using the software; just four more joined by October. Even in states that released EN apps, adoption was often agonizingly slow, with downloads far outpaced by similar efforts in countries like Ireland, where around a third of adults were using COVID-19-tracking apps as of November. In Alabama, only 3% of the state’s adult population had downloaded the state’s EN app by late October, more than two months after launch; by early December, that number was still just 4.6%. North Carolina and Pennsylvania, which both launched EN apps in late September, each managed to get around 6% of their adult populations on board as of early December. But EN app adoption rates in some states are now skyrocketing b...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news