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The NHS contact tracing app has prevented the transmission of hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 cases in England and Wales, the researchers estimated, in one of the world’s first studies on the effectiveness of the smartphone-based system developed. along with Apple and Google. .
Researchers from the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Oxford have estimated that every 1% increase in app users can reduce coronavirus cases by as much as 2.3%.
The app has sent 1.7 million notifications to its more than 21 million users asking people to isolate themselves so far. Of these, the Turing / Oxford researchers estimate that around 600,000 cases were prevented by the end of December.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, and Sir Keir Starmer, the Labor leader, have been among those told to isolate themselves in recent weeks after coming into contact with someone subsequently diagnosed with coronavirus.
“Our analysis shows that the NHS Covid-19 app sends exposure notifications to relevant contacts,” said Christophe Fraser, professor of pathogen dynamics in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford.
Measuring the effectiveness of Bluetooth-based proximity sensing applications, which have been launched by governments around the world, has been complicated by the privacy protections built into the Google / Apple system.
The anonymity of the app means that it is impossible to tell how many people have complied with your isolation orders.
The Turing / Oxford researchers used the limited location information that users must enter when downloading the app – the first half of their area’s zip code – to compare the app’s acceptance among neighboring local authorities.
That data was then compared to the total number of Covid-19 cases reported by each local authority. The researchers found a strong correlation between app use, which ranges from 15 to 45 percent of the general population, and the number of cases in a given region.
The document said that a statistical comparison of neighboring areas with similar socioeconomic or geographic properties suggested that there were 594,000 “infections averted,” but it returned a range of 317,000 and 914,000 with a 95% confidence interval.
Extrapolating from normal fatality rates, that suggests the app may have prevented thousands of deaths, the researchers estimate.
“The main limitation of our analysis is that it is an observational study: no random or systematic experiment resulted in a different application in different places,” the paper noted. “It remains possible that changes in application use over time and across geographies reflect changes in other interventions, and that our analysis incorrectly attributes the effect to the application.”
The NHS app ranks alongside that of Germany, which said last week that 25.4 million people had downloaded its Corona-Warn app, and Switzerland as one of the most widely used contact tracing apps in Europe.
“The NHS Covid-19 application now runs on tens of millions of phones, making it one of the most downloaded medical software products in the world,” said Wolfgang Emmerich, CEO of Zühlke UK, the Swiss IT company. who developed the app.
More than 56 percent of the eligible English and Welsh population, including smartphone owners aged 16 and over, have downloaded the NHS Covid-19 app since it was relaunched with Apple / Google technology in September, according to the Department. of Health and Social. Watch out. That’s just over a third of the total population of England and Wales.
But millions of people have disabled or uninstalled the app, partly out of fear of being told to isolate themselves unnecessarily. The Turing / Oxford research article reported that around 16.5 million people use it regularly, suggesting that nearly a quarter of the people who downloaded it have now been inactive.
The researchers also called for greater use of the app’s scanning system to record visits to physical locations, such as offices and cafes. The app had sent out just 226 notifications of “risk events in places” in total at the end of January.
People involved in the development of the app are eager to see the UK government give the app a renewed promotional push before the crashes are eased, even as a large chunk of the population has been vaccinated, as the virus will still be transmissible.
Another study by researchers in Spain, published in Nature earlier this year, estimated that at least 33 percent of the country’s population had downloaded the Radar Covid app, which is also based on the Apple and Google system.
Each infected individual was able to notify 6.3 contacts who had been in close proximity, twice what Spain’s manual contact tracing system would normally achieve.
This story has been updated since its publication to add more details from the research article.
