COVID-19 app won’t help health authorities much: Hirji

COVID Alert, Ontario’s new novel coronavirus tracking app purported to be a tool useful to speed up vital pandemic contact tracing, sounds good but likely will be of little use to the public health departments tasked with case management, says Niagara’s top health official.

“I think the idea of a COVID-19 tracing app has captured a lot of people’s imagination but ultimately I don’t think it is going to be all that useful,” said Dr. Mustafa Hirji, Niagara’s acting medical officer of health. “It’s not actually going to help us do our job much faster.”

The app, which has been approved by Ottawa and will be pushed hard by a provincial government marketing scheme, is more flash than substance, Hirji said, in part because of its expansive privacy protections.

COVID Alert, which can be downloaded voluntarily in July, will inform a user if someone in their contact list — who must also have app — tested positive for COVID-19. The alert can only happen if the infected contact tells the app they tested positive.

The user on the other end is not told who has tested positive, or when — or even if — they may have come into contact with them, but will tell the user to call their local public health department.

The app doesn’t collect personal information and automatically destroys what data it does have after 14 days. While

that is good news for the privacy-minded — including Hirji who resisted releasing municipality by municipality COVID-19 data in Niagara for weeks because he was worried low case numbers could be used to identify people in some communities — it effectively limits the usefulness of the app for public health authorities.

Mobile phone apps used in other countries, most notably South Korea, helped identify possible cases because they abandoned even the pretense of privacy protection for citizens.

“In those countries, an app was not the solution, but it was part of the solution,” Hirji said. “They were very invasive apps, collecting all the information about a user, who they are, where they have been and so on, and then made all of that information available to public health authorities.”

In the case of COVID Alert, Hirji said all public health will know is that someone has been told by the app that one of their contacts in their phone tested positive.

“That doesn’t really help us very much in terms of even knowing who this person has been in contact with,” Hirji said.

Traditional contact tracing starts with the infected person and works backwards to find people they have been in contact with while infected to find other linked cases and end the chain of virus transmission by getting people isolated and tested.

Hirji said the process can be labour intensive, but it is effective. He pointed to Germany’s high rate of success with contract tracing which relies entirely on human detective work by public health staff. The country does not use a smartphone app.

“There is not much evidence this kind of app would be particularly effective,” Hirji said.

The app’s effectiveness is also hampered by its voluntary nature. When Alberta launched a similar app, only 11 per cent of citizens downloaded it.

A University of Toronto epidemiologist told Torstar the low uptake rate is not surprising.

“People will dispense with their privacy without thinking if they get something for it,” said Colin Furness, “but you don’t actually get anything from this except for the possibility of bad news.”

Hirji said the province has set a benchmark for public health units to reach those who may have had contact with an infected person within 24 hours 95 per cent of the time.

He said the local public health department currently hits that benchmark 100 per cent of the time.

-with files from the Toronto

Star