Coronavirus contact tracing applications made big promises and never delivered

California launched a COVID-19 contact tracing app this week, and officials, including Apple Paul CEO Tim Cook, hailed it as an advancement that would help slow the ongoing surge in cases. The app will be easy to use. Measurements will be strict as to whether the application can deliver.

Nine months after Apple Paul and Google first announced their partnership, it is still difficult to measure the role of contact tracing apps in reducing viral transmission. Relatively few people have downloaded the apps, and due to the focus on the privacy of the apps, it is almost impossible to determine how much they are really capable of helping prevent the disease.

“I think it’s an impact on people who have evidence that they’re being affected,” says Ryan K. Lowe, a law professor at Washington University and director of the tech policy lab. “So far, I’ve been personally incontinent showing any kind of effectiveness.”

States spent hundreds of thousands of dollars each to develop these contact tracing apps, which are recreated as exposure notification apps during the summer. New York, for example, was priced at $ 700,000, while Virginia was priced at 22 9229,000. The applications were created to complement the state’s efforts to manually track and intercept COVID-19. Anyone who has tested positive for coronavirus still, ideally, receives a contact tracer phone. Contact tracers will ask who they communicate with while they may be infected, and they will ask people to quarantine or test for coronavirus.

Manual contact tracing is not appropriate – contact tracers can only detect people who know a sick person they were in contact with, and the process can be slow. That gap is the goal of filling automated contact tracing applications. In theory, they tested someone who tested positive warning strangers, standing on a long subway ride or grocery store staff with whom they communicated that they had been exposed to the virus. And it will happen quickly: those contacts will be automatically notified without having to wait for the treasure to be told by telling the app what you tested positive.

There’s a big catch: that the whole view depends on how many people download the app. Those strangers on the subway will have to use it to take advantage of the warning. If only a handful of people turn on exposure notifications, the random people with whom they interact in their daily lives are much less likely to run the system.

In many states, rapid growth has been slow. In New York, for example, COVID Alert NY, launched early October 5, has only 5 percent downloaded. Since the application began, less than 3,000 of the 180,000 people have tested positive, when it was launched and about 800 people have been exposed to exposure. The Nevada app was installed by about 4 percent of the population, a spokesman said Edge. Nearly the same percentage of Michigans use the MI Covid alert, and according to the spokesperson, only 142 people reported positive test results.

Virginia, the first state to launch an exposure notification app, has seen more success: about 10 percent of the population and about 20 percent of the 18- to 65-year-old population with a smartphone use the app, a health department spokesman said. Edge. Colorado’s app is even more popular – 20 percent of the population uses it, according to a statement from the state’s Emergency Operations Center.

The analysis suggests that the numbers reported by the states are still far below the level required to make a dent in the epidemic. According to a study by a team from Oxford University, 60% of the population will use a digital contact tracing system to stop the transmission of COVID-19. Other studies have found that controlling the epidemic, along with other public health measures, will take it to a higher or higher level of acceptance.

“We wouldn’t expect a big impact, depending on the type of 20 or 30 per cent rebound. This will be a small impact, says Isobel Braithwaite, a clinical fellow in public health at University College London and author of a review of automated contact tracing. He says it’s not all or nothing – a small effect can still push the issue of some percentage towards transmission and save people from disease. Another study, not yet published by Google and the University of Washington, found that if 15 percent of Washington State County users used the exposure notification application, the infection could drop by 8 percent.

“I’ve come to think of it in terms of spectrum, where you’ll benefit from higher levels of consumption. But despite the low levels, there is still a small advantage, ”says Braithwaite.

Studies from the University of Washington have shown that even at lower levels, applications have some utility, says Mike Reid, assistant professor of infectious disease at the University of California, San Francisco, who works at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Contact tracing. “My feeling is that anything that can help us reduce transmission can be taken advantage of.” COVID-19 spreads quickly, thus eliminating even a single case of potential infection. “Whenever you reach out to a case and help them understand their need to be isolated, you know you are preventing the next thousands of infections,” says Reed.

The challenge is, researchers won’t be able to differentiate whether apps are actually preventing that infection. Expos Expert notification technology based on modeling, including studies at Oxford University and the University of Washington. Experts use data and diagrams to create maps To be able to Depending on how they spread COVID-19 and how contact tracing usually works, it happens when a certain number of people download the app. But they don’t track the progress of apps to find out what’s really going on.

Photo by UE Mock / PA Images by Getty Images

Google and Apple Play have made privacy and security a major issue when developing apps. They want to allay concerns that companies are looking for users’ whereabouts, so any information collected by the app is unrecognizable. But by reducing the amount of data they collect, there is no easy way to evaluate how these exposure notification programs actually work after they are implemented.

“Given the nature of how they do it in terms of prioritizing privacy, it’s very challenging to accurately assess their impact,” Reid says.

The United Kingdom initially tried to develop its own contact tracing application outside of the Google and Apple Plus systems, which could gather more information about usage. “They turned to more privacy, maintaining Apple Pal and Google’s approach to a wider national rollout due to political and public perceptions,” says Brittweat. “That makes studying the effect very difficult.”

Researchers do not know, for example, how many of the people receiving instructions on the apps follow the isolation guidelines or get tested for COVID-19. They also do not know how many of the people receiving the notifications have not been flagged by the manual contact tracer. “You see, there are situations where they never knew,” says Kalo. A strong assessment will figure out how often a person was in a situation when they received instruction from a stranger, actually separated and ended up developing symptoms themselves.

Kello argues that this is the key to evaluating whether apps are worth investing in. “They would never have been contracted or tested, and we saved a lot of people that way,” he says. “And then you have to put that number against the number of how much was paid for the application.”

For Braithwaite, even a slight reduction in virus transmission would cost millions of dollars to develop and roll out exposure notification applications. “We buy a little more time until the vaccine by pressing the transmission slightly,” he says. She says the lack of clear cut evidence is not a reason to ignore applications. It took researchers time to study how the mask helped slow the spread of coronavirus, he notes, but public health experts still told everyone to wear it while the procedure was underway. “We have no evidence that they will not work.”

Reed says there is no precedent for using such technology as part of a public health response to any disease. It had never been used before and developed amid an epidemic. Its use against the Covid-19 is, in some ways, just a trial run. Despite the severe data difficulties, researchers will still try to sort out how effectively the viral transmission works – perhaps by comparing coronaviruses spread to areas without any application, says Braithwaite. Having at least a hint towards the answers will help move forward in public health decision making.

“The lessons we learn will have an impact on how future epidemics will unfold,” says Reed. “I think it’s important to evaluate its impact right now, and determine if this will be part of our plan to respond to future epidemics.”