OAKLAND, Caliph. (Reuters) – North Dakota, Wyoming and Alabama are the latest U.S. states to launch apps to warn users about potential exposure to the new coronavirus by following their conversations, state officials told Reuters on Thursday.
FILE PHOTO: The 1919 mobile app, which North Dakota and South Dakota officials have asked residents to download to help with contact detection during the global outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19), is viewed on a phone call, US April 24, 2020. REUTERS / Paresh Dave
Virginia last week became the first U.S. state to encourage residents to download such an app using technology developed by smartphone software giants Apple Inc and Google from Alphabet Inc.
About 316,000 people have downloaded Virginia’s COVIDWISE app, state health official Jeff Stover told Reuters during an online event on pandemic technology hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-affiliated Responsible Data Foundation.
North Dakota launched its app, Care19 Alert, on Thursday and Wyoming will release an app on Friday, whose company ProudCrowd developed the apps, also said during the event.
Alabama, which has tested its GuideSafe app among some college students and staff, plans to begin marketing statewide Monday, said Sue Feldman, director of graduate programs in health informatics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Washington, which recently tested its CommonCircle app in a hospital, and Pennsylvania are among other states that could launch formal apps using Apple-Google technology in the coming weeks.
The technology enables phones to exchange Bluetooth signals to keep an anonymous list of nearby meetings. An infected user can anonymously inform recent contacts to be tested as quarantine.
But developers acknowledge that they still face challenges in convincing users that tracking and notification systems are private and reliable.
For example, getting in touch with apps from different states to communicate with each other because users cross borders is not testing with North Dakota’s app now the first and only one in the United States to support that functionality.
North Dakota has previously released an app, Care19 Diary, to help users remember their location history before tracking contacts.
Report by Paresh Dave; Edited by Tom Brown
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