It seems like just yesterday Apple and Google stunned the tech community by announcing a rare team-up to develop contact tracing technology to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Or maybe that was three years ago. Who knows? Probably somewhere in between Tiger King and Murder Hornets, but who can really be sure?
Jokes aside, the two tech behemoths first announced plans to double team COVID-19 with a software update to include built-in contact tracing into iPhone and Android operating systems on April 10. The feature was opened up to developers later that month, but was officially launched as part of an OS update on May 20.
Now more than two months after it was launched and about four months into this pandemic response, we still have nothing.
Chances are if you go into your (up-to-date) phone’s settings right now, you’ll be able to find COVID-19 Exposure Notifications buried somewhere in the Privacy section. If you go in and try to enable the feature, you’ll be met with a brick wall stating that you first need to install a dedicated app.
Fair enough. You make your way to your dedicated app store and search for “COVID-19.” Only, you’re met with nothing but symptom checkers, geographic infection rates, and safety tips.
Much like trying to order hummus at Denny’s, you’ll quickly realize the app you’re looking for does not exist.
In order for any user to be able to opt into the Apple and Google COVID-19 contact tracing program, their state must first agree to adopt the Exposure Notification API. They then need to create their own mobile to fit the constructs of their public health authority.
Care to take a guess at how many states have agreed to participate? (Hint: It’s fewer than five and rhymes with “floor.”)
Alabama, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Virginia are the only states in the US that have opted in, according to 9to5Mac. Even a sport as accepting of failure as baseball can’t make those statistics look remotely impressive.
Of those states, it appears only North Dakota and Alabama are close to releasing their states’ apps.
In other words, the Apple and Google API has been a flop. Thus far, anyway.
Most other states have opted to address the issue the old-fashioned way. The US had approximately 28,000 people working as contact tracers in mid-June. CDC Director Robert Redfield estimated the country would need a total of 100,000 contact tracers in order to properly combat the spread of COVID-19.
Whether app-based or human-based, both forms of contact tracing have the same goal: Notify those who may have been exposed to confirmed cases.
The human-based approach, for obvious reasons, requires a higher level of effort.
If a person tests positive for COVID-19, they’ll be contacted by a state contact tracer in order to determine all of the other people who could have potentially been infected. That contact tracer will acquire contact information for those potentially infected people, reaching out to each person individually to notify them of the news. Those people will then be asked to monitor symptoms while they self-quarantine for 14 days, or potentially get tested as well.
This approach has some noteworthy drawbacks. In order for this to be an ideal solution, the original infected person must know each and every individual they came in contact with. They must also have contact information for those individuals. This is obviously problematic for somebody who tested positive after, say, having gone out to an indoor bar. There’s no plausible way to successfully contact every individual who may have been infected.
(Lest we forget the monumentally tall task of getting anybody under the age of 30 to actually answer the phone. Thanks, millennials.)
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The app-based approach addresses some of these concerns.
Rather manually notifying each person individually, Apple and Google built their contact tracing API around Bluetooth technology. If a person tests positive, they log it into the application and then the app will notify anybody who may have been exposed based on proximity determined via Bluetooth pings (we do a much better job of explaining this here). So, in that theoretical indoor bar scenario from before, the person who tested positive wouldn’t actually need to be familiar with every single person inside the establishment.
Apps leave a lot to be desired too, though, namely in their dependency on user adoption. Because for as effective as the apps could be, it still requires users to opt in and download the app.
(And don’t get me started on the difficulties one may face in asking anybody over the age of 60 to download a mobile application. Thanks, boomers.)
Utah, deciding to make an app without Apple’s and Google’s help, knows the feeling all too well. The state spent $2.75 million to create the app, dubbed Healthy Together. It spends an additional $300,000 a month to maintain the application. The problem? Only about 53,000 people downloaded the app as of June 29, accounting for 1.6% of the state’s population (via KUTV).
Ireland, meanwhile, launched its own app, COVID Tracker, on July 7. Utilizing Apple’s and Google’s API, Ireland’s app received 1.3 million downloads in just the first week, approximately 37% of the country’s adult population.
Ireland’s Health Service Executive recently announced it was donating the COVID Tracker code to the Linux Foundation as open source for the non-profit organization. NearForm, the company that built the app, says it can get a state set up and launched in about a month.
Some states in the US, including Pennsylvania, have spoken with Ireland about potentially reskinning the application to utilize it for themselves.