The state of Nevada on Monday launches an app that allows people who have tested positive for COVID-19 to discreetly report their close contacts of a possible exposure, a potentially significant injury in a tourism-driven state that has not had much up to this point the ability to contact their visitors and sometimes even the difficulty of locating all their residents.
The contact tracking app, called COVID-Trace, will be fully opt-in, which means users will not only have to download the app to take advantage of its functionality, but those who test positive for COVID-19 will have to take an extra step into the app to notify those with whom they have come in contact about a possible exposure.
Julia Peek, deputy director for the Department of Public and Behavioral Health, framed the app as a key tool to help the state combat the spread of COVID-19 during a presentation of the app to reporters on Friday.
“Please help your neighbors, friends, family, stay safe and healthy by downloading the COVID Trace and encourage others to download it as well,” Peek said. “It’s a great opportunity for Nevadans, and our visitors to do more, one more thing to continue the fight against COVID to protect themselves and move Nevada to fully reopen.”
The app, which was developed by a team of former engineers from Google and Uber, draws on underlying technology developed jointly by Google and Apple earlier this year to help states make phone-based contact tracking. It will be available for public download through the Apple App Store and Google Play Stores and will be in both English and Spanish, depending on the user’s settings.
Nevada app release comes on top of launches of similar apps in Virginia and Alabama this month.
The way it will work is this: When two phones are in close contact, they will exchange anonymous tokens and store them via Bluetooth. Each person’s phone will then continuously scan the cloud to see if any of the tokens attached to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 is a match against the tokens that their phone has stored.
If Person A tests positive for COVID-19, they will receive a call from a pathologist who will walk them through the contact tracking process and provide a unique code for Person A to enter the app, if Person A does has used and wants the app to notify their close contacts. Once the code is entered, Person A’s phone shares its token anonymously with the cloud.
If Person B has been in close contact with Person A for the last 14 days, when Person B’s phone scans the cloud and downloads the tokens of those who test positive, it will find a match against the tokens that it has saved. Person B will then receive a notification warning them that they were near someone who tested positive for COVID-19 and the date of that exposure, but they will not be told about Person A’s identity.
In fact, app developers and government officials say the app will not collect or store any personal information, including username, location, phone number and health information. State officials have said the Nevada Attorney General’s office was involved in every step of the app development process to ensure proper consumer protection was in place.
Users will need to agree to both the built-in contact tracking interface built into their phones built by Apple or Google and receive notifications as part of the app setup process.
“The first thing we want to emphasize is privacy and really at home beat the fact that there is very little of everything we know about you,” said Dudley Carr, developer of COVID Trace. ‘We do not know your location. We do not know who you are. We did not know the contacts on your phone. That’s a common misconception. Contact tracing is about touching. It’s not about who your contacts are. It does not have any of your health information and it certainly does not share that with anyone else. ”
The app uses an algorithm to determine if two people have been in close contact. For example, it weighs five minutes of very close contact as opposed to 20 minutes of further, but still close contact, with the power of the phones’ Bluetooth signals.
“The weight of these experiences and does an accumulation of that to determine a total exposure of 15 minutes for the day,” Carr said. “Unfortunately, it’s pretty complicated, but what it’s trying to do is, it says, all these experiences together is the equivalent of being with COVID-19 for 15 minutes during the day, and then you’ll be warned. based on that. ”
However, the success of the app will depend to a large extent on the number of people downloading it, as it will not be able to perform its contact tracking features unless the person testing positive for COVID-19 and the person being exposed to COVID-19 the app has to download on their phones before the exposure occurs.
Creating the app was spearheaded by the COVID-19 Response, Relief and Recovery Task Force, announced in March by Gov. Steve Sisolak and has focused on mobilizing the interests of the private sector to help in the response of the coronavirus state. PLAYSTUDIOS, the developer of the mobile slot game, fully endorsed the cost of developing the app.
Former MGM Resorts CEO Jim Murren, who chaired the task force, said they were talking to “large and medium-sized employers” about the app and that “several dozen companies” in the state, including MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment, were going through the process of not only adopting the app, but transmitting information about them through their media channels.
“They believe this is important not only for their employees, but for the community itself and therefore to the extent that MGM or, let’s say, Caesars, with whom I had a robust conversation this week, have said, if we can use our media channels, our media contacts, our assets to communicate that this is an effective tool to help the people of Nevada, we would be honored to do so, ”said Murren.
Murren said he expects to hear more about the app from many of Nevada’s major employers and representatives of organized labor, such as those in the public sector and in the sports and entertainment field.
“Stay tuned,” he said. “But I could also say, no one has said no to me yet.”
The app was able to give a significant boost to the state’s ability to contact rail among visitors, which has been limited so far. Since June, local health districts have acknowledged that attempting all interactions from a visit to multiple casino properties over the weekend was not possible, and the data show how many cases among visitors testing positive for COVID-19 after the returns from home are ever reported to the state for contact purposes.
The state also struggled last month to keep up with its efforts to contact residents, as the state was overloaded with thousands of new COVID-19 cases. Officials from Southern Nevada Health District said last week that they will now contact all new cases within 24 to 48 hours of receiving their positive lab report, although they will continue to work through contact with all overdue cases from July.
