People who think they have had Covid-19 ‘less likely to download contact-tracing app’
People who think they have had coronavirus are less likely to download a contact-tracing app, even if they have no proof that they ever contracted the virus, according to a study published this week.
The finding highlights the potential long-term damage of the UK government’s early policy of not testing to confirm self-reported Covid-19 infection, the authors, from Imperial College’s faculty of medicine, say.
In the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the authors analysed results from a questionnaire of more than 10,000 NHS users, and found that for the UK at large, “a willingness for appbased contact tracing is 60% … substantially less than the smartphone-user uptake considered necessary for appbased contact-tracing to be an effective intervention to help suppress an epidemic”.
Two main failings have kept that number low. The first is the fact that people who think they have already had coronavirus are significantly less likely (27%) to say they will install a contact-tracing app than those who do not think they have caught the infection. In the absence of widespread testing, however, it is difficult to know how many of those people have had the disease. It also remains unclear precisely how much protection having caught Covid-19 affords someone against becoming a carrier again in the future.
“The UK adopted a public health policy during lockdown of instruction to stay at home if symptomatic of Covid-19 unless becoming very unwell with it,” the researchers noted, “resulting in a large number of people who believe they have had Covid-19 but without confirmatory testing.”
Those people “may be less willing to participate on account of believing they may have immunity. Feeling the individual threat of Covid-19 no longer applies to them, this may also diminish the incentive to participate in the app to avoid risking being asked to potentially self-isolate for 14 days, at present regardless of perceived or objective history of Covid-19.”
People who confessed to not understanding the government’s messaging around coronavirus were also less likely to download the app, the researchers found, posing a problem for strategies that involve regular nuanced updates to what people can and cannot do.
But by far the largest reason for not wanting to download the app was privacy concerns, cited by two-thirds of those who said they would not download the app.
To have “beneficial impact on an epidemic”, a contact-tracing app would need to be installed by 80% of smartphone users, according to an April paper written for NHSX. The UK’s contact-tracing app is currently only available only to residents of the Isle of
Wight, and the government says it will be available across the rest of the UK by the end of June.