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By comparison, more than 4.2 million cases of COVID were reported statewide from December 2020 through December 2021.īy the state’s estimates, about 52 percent of its 31.9 million residents aged 15 and older eligible to activate CA Notify actually did so. In 14 months, according to CDPH, 16.5 million cell phone users activated the app on both platforms, resulting in 1.19 million exposure notifications being sent out to users in California.
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While iPhone users only need to enable exposure notifications in their phone’s settings, Android users must download the app and activate it. “Our preliminary analyses using mathematical modeling suggest CA Notify may have prevented thousands of new COVID-19 cases and averted hundreds of deaths in California since its launch” on December 10, 2020, according to an email from CDPH’s communications office.ĬA Notify is available to both Android and iPhone users equally, but their ease of use varies. The state of California is telling a different story. University College London researchers reviewed more than 100 studies on automated COVID contact tracing, like smartphone apps, and concluded that the contact-tracing technologies they studied showed no empirical evidence of effectiveness in identifying infected contacts or reducing disease transmission. We don’t have evidence that it works in a lot of different places and a lot of different types of communities,” Gennie Gebhart, EFF’s activism director, said in an interview with Klosowski. “We don’t have evidence that this works at scale. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that advocates for digital rights and privacy. “Bluetooth and GPS weren’t made for this function, so quirks in the technologies may prohibit them from being effective,” wrote Klosowski.
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Bluetooth measures proximity, but it cannot take into account other factors, such as how people are separated (like by a plexiglass barrier in a grocery store or an apartment building wall) or whether they are masked. However, Klosowski also argued that exposure notification apps that rely on Bluetooth, like CA Notify and similar apps, aren’t necessarily any better. GPS-based apps also drain phone batteries and might not be accurate beyond a distance of 65 feet, according to Wirecutter’s privacy and security editor Thorin Klosowski, in a November 2020 article. As a result, contact tracing apps that rely upon GPS have privacy issues around location data that apps using Bluetooth don’t have.

In that case, health care providers personally contact individuals who test positive and ask them for the names of everyone with whom they’ve had intimate contact.ĭigital contact tracing apps simplify this process by leveraging GPS location data to notify a smartphone user if they were within close proximity to someone with COVID and where the contact occurred. True contact tracing is how public health crises, like outbreaks of sexually transmitted infections such as HIV, are managed. How effective were the Golden State’s efforts to keep its residents healthy and safe? Were Californians receptive to using the tools and apps developed to help them? Was the effort necessary to roll out these public technology responses worth it? The results are mixed. To date, more than 9.6 million cases of COVID have been reported in California and the official death toll has surpassed 91,000. An exposure notification app helped people determine if they’d been in close contact with someone infected with COVID. Later, they used their smartphones to schedule vaccinations and download their digital vaccine passports. At the start of the pandemic, California residents could find the latest COVID data in an online hub.
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Other states also used technology to address the public health crisis, but California’s robust portfolio of pandemic-related apps and software sets the state apart. Since the earliest days of the pandemic, California has leveraged technology and policy to become a leader in the fight to slow the transmission of COVID. But all new tools face the same challenge: How do you get people to use them? Efficacy hinges on adoption and, in the case of technology, implementation.

As COVID proliferated in 2020, many governments tried to harness new tools to slow the spread. During the COVID-19 pandemic, public interest technology tools, like COVID smartphone apps, were intended to augment personal preventative measures, like social distancing and masks. It can also help preserve vestiges of normalcy amid a global pandemic. Technology can be a powerful tool in efforts to save lives and stabilize shaky economic conditions.
