On August 9 2022, Australia’s COVIDSafe app was formally decommissioned, and all its options eliminated. People have been inspired to uninstall the app. Reports of its closure have made worldwide information.
On ceasing COVIDSafe, well being minister Mark Butler stated the “Albanese government acted to delete the wasteful and ineffective COVIDSafe app” and accused the previous authorities of losing “more than $21 million of taxpayer’s money on this failed app”.
Was COVIDSafe a magic bullet, as per the earlier authorities, or a complete failure, as the present authorities desires us to consider?
The writing was on the wall
Designed to assist guide contract tracers discover constructive COVID instances, the app was launched in April 2020.
Rewind to the primary months of the pandemic, and Australians have been inspired by then prime minister Scott Morrison to obtain the app, which he in comparison with placing on sunscreen when going outdoor and a “ticket to opening up our economy”.
To some, it was clear already in 2020 the app wasn’t going to realize expectations. It additionally disappeared from politicians’ vocabularies, and there have been mounting calls to scrap it in 2021.
Overall, the decommissioning of the app this week shouldn’t come as a shock – there was additionally a strict sundown clause put into regulation when it was first developed.
covidsafe.gov.au
But is there a silver lining – can we learn something from the COVIDSafe experiment? Here is our scorecard.
Some passes, some fails
PASS: Automating guide contact tracing
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, most public well being programs relied on guide contact tracing, a device many thought at first could be ineffective for managing and controlling a quickly spreading illness on a big scale.
One of the targets of COVIDSafe was to automate the guide work, to assist the efforts of contact tracers at scale. This objective was achieved, though the worth and effectiveness are questionable, as we talk about beneath.
PASS: Mass adoption
Few programs have wanted fast and widespread adoption to the extent that COVIDSafe did. The app did attain the preliminary anticipated goal threshold of 40%. There have been greater than 7.7 million downloads, with 3 million Australians downloading the app by the top of April 2020.
Getting so many Australians to obtain new and contested know-how is an unparalleled achievement. While the variety of downloads doesn’t inform us how many individuals have been actively utilizing the app, it reveals some success in getting individuals to a minimum of obtain and interact with it.
A big problem was additionally to make the app accessible to a variety of individuals with various ranges of tech aptitude. Despite its questionable effectiveness, technical and registration points, COVIDSafe struck a steadiness between being aesthetic and comparatively simple to make use of.
Read extra:
70% of individuals surveyed stated they’d obtain a coronavirus app. Only 44% did. Why the hole?
FAIL: Improving the effectivity and accuracy of contact tracing
The COVIDSafe app solely helped to establish two constructive instances not reported by guide contact tracing. This can be partly attributed to the success of Australia’s suppression technique – low case numbers in 2020 meant the app was not absolutely examined “in the wild”.
As of November 2021, solely 792 COVID-positive COVIDSafe customers consented to add their knowledge to the nationwide database. Australian states additionally launched QR code scanning at public locations (reminiscent of transport, retailers, sport venues, cafes, accommodations and eating places) that overlapped with the function of the app.
Independent analysis means that COVIDSafe was “an additional step that increased workload [for contact tracing staff] without delivering any added value”.
FAIL: Easing restrictions, opening the financial system, and returning to ‘normal’
The Morrison authorities framed COVIDSafe as an integral a part of its plan to take away restrictions imposed on society and open the financial system. COVIDSafe didn’t ship on this, as a lot of Australia continued to face robust restrictions and remained in lockdowns till late 2021.
FAIL: Suppressing COVID-19 and its unfold
Another broadly popularised objective of COVIDSafe was controlling the unfold of the illness. Despite early optimism round such apps, this objective was not achieved.
It was unrealistic to count on a contact-tracing app to suppress the unfold of a virus whose epidemiological traits evolve over time.
Read extra:
Australia has all however deserted the COVIDSafe app in favour of QR codes (so be sure you examine in)
Lessons for the longer term
Getting programs proper is a course of. Understanding the failures and successes of COVIDSafe is a helpful place to begin to advance the dialog on what “digital contact tracing 2.0” ought to appear like.
Avoid techno-optimism
A techno-optimism ideology – the concept that there’s a tech resolution for each advanced drawback – was on the root of creating COVIDSafe within the first place. Officials used metaphors reminiscent of “digital vaccine”, “sunscreen” and “road to recovery”, suggesting the app would shield people from being contaminated and return life again to “normal”.
In creating well being purposes, authorities ought to use “digital also” as a substitute of a “digital first” strategy. Health apps, particularly new and quickly deployed ones, shouldn’t be conflated with medical options. Otherwise, we threat unrealistic expectations and lack of public belief.
Understanding the wants
COVIDSafe confirmed that digitalising a guide contact-tracing course of doesn’t essentially make it simpler. In a July 2021 report back to parliament, then well being minister Greg Hunt admitted “the use of existing, well established tracing processes has limited the need of public health officials to rely on COVIDSafe”.
When defining the scope and function of an app, we want a greater understanding of everybody’s necessities and current guide processes.
Manage knowledge quantity
As COVIDSafe was developed and launched, a lot consideration was lavished on privateness considerations, Bluetooth connectivity, accessibility and mass acceptance.
But it appears much less consideration was given to the wants of public well being employees. The app difficult the work of contact tracers who have been shortly overwhelmed by knowledge quantity. Public well being employees must be supplied with efficient instruments to handle incoming knowledge; in this case, it will have helped to determine which encounters wanted to be checked for potential shut contacts.
Privacy preservation
Privacy concerns have been central within the growth of COVIDSafe, with a spread of measures utilized throughout the precise app, its laws and its use.
Future apps must be developed to present individuals management over the gathering and sharing of their mobility knowledge, so customers can choose applicable choices in response to their private privateness preferences.
Read extra:
The COVIDSafe invoice does not go far sufficient to guard our privateness. Here’s what wants to alter
So, was COVIDSafe definitely worth the funding?
Australia was not the one nation to develop a contact-tracing app. Several German-speaking nations, France, India and Singapore developed related apps with assorted success, whereas the United Kingdom, Italy, Latvia and others made us of the publicity notification system Apple and Google developed.
COVIDSafe displays the urgency of early 2020 and the sturdy assist for such know-how from epidemiologists and different medical professionals.
It was additionally a bit like taking out an insurance coverage coverage we didn’t absolutely want: preliminary public acceptance didn’t align with low constructive case numbers. It’s unclear whether or not an identical app deployed in 2022 would have led to a unique end result.
Overall, it is exhausting to count on a monetary return on such emergency funding. The app gave some individuals hope and luxury in the course of the darkish intervals of 2020, arguably delivering a social return on funding.
Read extra:
The COVIDSafe app was designed to assist contact tracers. We crunched the numbers to see what actually occurred