“We’re here tonight to roll out the innovations,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Wednesday. He said, “When it comes to closing the covid in his band,” he said, “information is power.”
The mayor then announced a new initiative with a private company called Citizen, which will use the company’s app, installed on residents’ cell phones, to track their contacts and movements and alert them to any potential cowardly contact.
The app is called SafePass and it promises to track your movements anonymously using Bluetooth technology.
From the Safepass website:
Safespace is your daily goal for COVID-related alerts and activity, including exposure to people who test positive, meaningful interactions that increase your risk, test results, test locations, and feature tracking. Enable contact tracing and find out exactly when and where you came in contact with COVID-19.
Related story
California Coronavirus Update: Governor Gavin News reports minimal daily case counts in about 4 months
“Everyone’s information remains anonymous and encrypted,” said LA County Supervisor Catherine Berger.
The company says personal data is deleted after 30 days and within 24 hours after someone stops using the service. The Safepass website says, “The only information to help identify the COVID-19 hotspot is anonymously collected data.”
We are partnering ItizCitizenappLA To provide our communities with the latest information about the COVID case. This effort is another tool to help us stay healthy, safe and awake. pic.twitter.com/kzmfGds1WQ
– Supervisor Katherine Berger (Katherineberger) September 10, 2020
The Citizen Safepass application was launched in early 2019 in Los Angeles. Now 1 million people in LA County have the app, according to Citizen CEO Rev. Andrew Frame. According to the company’s web site, 27% of New York City residents already use the app.
When launched in 2019, the app was more about pushing customers rather than collecting information. It was explained that Citizen’s Central Operations Team monitored a variety of publicly available information – such as a police scanner chatter – and pushed out instructions to users within certain radii of the incident.
Since then, monitoring techniques have been added and expanded to allow coronavirus contact tracing.
“It’s not a replacement for formal contact tracing,” Garcetti said.
The app can be downloaded to the Apple Pal App Store or just enabled if you use an Android device.
Garcetti also unveiled a new standalone coronavirus testing kiosk at Union Station in partnership with Curative Testing and LA Metro. It operates from Wednesday to Sunday and can serve up to 500 people a day.
On Wednesday, LA County announced that there were at least 671 new cases of coronavirus reported and 61 additional deaths. A statement from the county’s health department warned that a greater number of new deaths were due to a backlog of reports received over the weekend, and a lower number of new cases showed a decline in testing due to excessive heat.
Currently, there are 936 people whose confirmation is currently hospitalized and 33% of these people are in the ICU.
While those numbers are low, Garcetti warned that the flu season is on and Safepass could be an invaluable tool in fighting any new remedy.
See below for the mayor’s news conference.
https://twitter.com/MayorOfLA/status/1303849366206083072
