Canadian COVID app glitch causing worry, confusion
Every night, before he goes to sleep, Steve Hambleton puts his iPhone on airplane mode. He has three young kids and a job working with seniors who have developmental disabilities. All of that’s draining in the best of times, and for a lot of reasons, these are not the best of times.
For almost six months this year, Hambleton was off work, taking care of the kids. His wife makes more money than he does, and they have no family in the Ottawa area, where they live. So, when the schools closed in March it was an easy choice to make. But that doesn’t mean it was an easy thing to do, for him or his family.
Even after the schools reopened in September, things didn’t get much easier for Hambleton. He’s been on and off work all fall, dealing with sick kids one week, testing lags another, and most recently, a COVID outbreak at their school. It’s been draining, emotionally and physically. So, when he does get a chance to sleep, he doesn’t want anything messing it up, especially not a pinging phone.
Three weeks ago, Hambleton woke up, rolled over, and turned his phone back on. Right away, an alert popped up on the screen. “Your device identified 3 potential exposures this week, and shared them with COVID Alert,” it read.
Hambleton had a shift coming up. He didn’t know what to
do. Should he go to work? Did he need a test? What about the kids? He opened the Government of Canada’s COVID Alert app, hoping to find out more. And that’s when things got really strange.
Inside the app, Hambleton saw a white hand in a thumb’s up pose against a green background. “No exposure detected,” it said. “You have not been near anyone who reported a COVID-19 diagnosis through this app.”
Hambleton had no idea what to do. Should he trust the alert or the app? Had he been exposed or hadn’t he? Making things worse, the alert disappeared after he clicked on it. He couldn’t find it to compare what it said to what was inside
the app. “It was a little scary,” he said. “If I was exposed, I’d like to know what to do, who to call.”
Hambleton’s wife, Michelle Macland-Hambleton, eventually got on the phone to Ottawa Public Health. “The nurse that I got, she kind of chuckled,” Macland-Hambleton said. “And she said, ‘you know, that app is just causing a lot more chaos than needed right now.’”
Hambleton is one of an unknown number of Canadians who have been fooled by their iPhone’s software into believing they’ve been exposed to COVID-19. The notice he got wasn’t from the Canadian COVID Alert app. Instead, it was a weekly summary of
“potential exposures” logged by his iPhone.
According to Health Canada, the software the iPhone uses to enable the COVID Alert app logs potential exposures in a different, broader, way than the app itself does. At the end of the week, many iPhones continue to send summaries of those potential exposures to users as a push notification.
The alert appeared on Beisan Zubi’s phone last Sunday. It had a red alert logo in one corner and the title “COVID19 Exposure logging.” “Your device identified 10 potential exposures this week,” it said.
“It did definitely throw me off because I live by myself. I’ve been working from home. I have not been exposed to 10 people who were COVIDpositive,” Zubi, who lives in Waterloo, Ont., said.
Zubi runs her own communications firm. She’s a writer and former political staffer with a broad network online. So, when she couldn’t figure out what the alert meant, she did what came naturally. “I tweeted about it and I got an answer,” she said.
Andrea Gilbrook, a former colleague who now works for Canadian Digital Services, replied to Zubi’s tweet with an explanation. “This is an Apple thing,” she wrote, and pointed her to a Tweet thread laying out the details.
On Oct. 7, Digital Services, the government department, explained the discrepancy in a series of five tweets. “Some notifications are sent from your phone’s operating system and not from COVID Alert itself,” one of them read. “Your OS defines exposures differently from the app. We know, it’s confusing.”
“If you get a notification from your operating system that you’ve been exposed, check the COVID Alert app before taking action,” another tweet said. “The app follows Canada’s public health guidance to determine an exposure.”
A spokesman for Health Canada said in an email that the government first discovered the problem in late August. Apple issued a fix in a software update on Sept. 1. “If you haven’t already, make sure you have the latest OS installed to fix this issue,” the Digital Services team wrote in another Tweet. The bottom line is, according to Health Canada, you should be following what the app says, not the iPhone. So even if you get an alert warning you of “potential exposures,” you shouldn’t book a test unless the app itself says you’ve been exposed.