Tracing must be national
Test and trace: for many weeks our public health leaders have been telling us that’s the formula for successfully reopening society and heading off a dreaded second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And for at least as long, we’ve been hearing about problems with testing (not enough, too slow) and tracing (an uneven, patchwork system across the country).
Finally, there’s an encouraging sign that we may at last be getting our act together on the tracing front. Starting on July 2, Ontario will roll out a smartphone app designed to alert users that they’ve been exposed to someone with COVID-19.
They’ll then be asked to get tested and, if they test positive, they can seek treatment or self-isolate before the disease spreads any further. It’s key to stopping COVID-19 without having to lock down the economy again.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is pushing this as a “madein-Canada” national solution that will be ready to be used right across the country, if the provinces go along.
They should, if the new app lives up to its billing. Right now, the provinces are struggling with contact tracing and in typical Canadian fashion they’re going their own ways with a mix of technologies and regulations that are leaving us with an unclear picture of the pandemic across the country.
Surely in this case, at least, they should agree on one standard approach that will be more effective for public health authorities and easier to use for ordinary Canadians.
The new app will be successful only to the extent that people willingly adopt it: load it onto their phones and respond if they receive an alert that they’ve been exposed. Public health officials have an ambitious target of getting 50 per cent of people to use it.
But that won’t be easy. People worry about their privacy, of having their personal health information ending up in the wrong hands.
The developers of the new app — the Ontario government, along with the federal Canadian Digital Service, e-commerce giant Shopify and BlackBerry — say they’ve designed it to address those fears.
It will be based on Bluetooth technology used in Apple and Google products, so devices will be able to sense one another without the information going through a central hub and risking exposure to a third party.
Nor will it collect or store any personal data, or location information through GPS. Anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 will receive an eight-digit number along with their results; once they enter the number into the app, it will activate the system and alert all those whose phones have been close to theirs, and therefore potentially exposed to the disease.
On the face of it, all this should calm fears about privacy. But it’s a lot to expect people to download an app, use a code to activate the alerts if they test positive, and turn up at a testing centre if they’ve been exposed.
It will take a big push from governments to persuade enough people to do this to make a difference. So making it a national program will help a lot. Limited, local efforts aren’t proving to be effective; Alberta introduced its own tracing app more than a month ago, but it had technical problems and ended up with little take-up.
Contact tracing apps are no magic bullet. Ontario authorities say they see the new one as just a supplement to old-fashioned tracing for infectious diseases carried out by actual humans trained to figure out where dangerous transmission has happened, and how to stop it.
But at this point we can’t afford to slide backwards. The cost of the pandemic, in both dollars and health, has been astronomical so far. And anything that promises to keep us on the path toward successful reopening is worth a shot.
All the provinces and territories should get on board. And, barring unforeseen problems, the rest of us should download the new app as soon as it’s available — and use it.