{"id":34616,"date":"2022-01-04T15:58:10","date_gmt":"2022-01-04T20:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=34616"},"modified":"2022-02-11T20:14:59","modified_gmt":"2022-02-12T01:14:59","slug":"exposure-notification-update-january-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/04\/exposure-notification-update-january-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Exposure Notification Update, January 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gerrit De Vynck and Cat Zakrzewski<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The tech giants managed to build and launch the “exposure notification” framework in months, a previously unheard-of level of collaboration for the rivals.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

But nearly two years later, as the omicron variant sweeps across the United States, adoption of the system is still far behind what its creators and proponents envisioned. More than 20 states don’t use it at all, including large states like Florida and Texas that have reported millions of cases and tens of thousands of deaths. Even in states where millions have activated the notifications, only a fraction of people who test positive for the virus report it to the Apple and Google system. California’s system, for example, has been activated on more than 15 million devices, but only about 3 percent of the nearly 3.9 million cases reported since launch were logged in the system.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The apps are “not really talked about as part of the mitigation strategy,” said Kameka Dempsey, a co-chair of the Covid-19 Technology Task Force, a group of prominent technologists and venture capitalists working on efforts to combat the virus.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anecdotally, there still seems to be little awareness of these apps outside of tech circles. And without lots of people using them they’re not very helpful.<\/p>\n\n

Via Nick Heer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Similarly, this Post<\/em> report paints a bleak picture of the framework’s poor adoption in the U.S., which Karen L. Howard of the GAO blamed partly on a lack of privacy protections in U.S. law. But I have had a hard time finding similar information about other countries’ responses.<\/p>\n\n

The Apple–Google exposure notification framework is the system adopted by national COVID apps in Germany, Ireland, and Switzerland, where there are much stricter data privacy laws than in the U.S., which has perhaps played a role in driving higher adoption rates. Even still, finding evidence that this framework has played a meaningful difference in this pandemic is hard to come by. Irish authorities were understandably proud of their country’s rapid adoption rate<\/a>, but a report earlier this year found that only a quarter of cases<\/a> in Ireland were registered in the app.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n