You may have been exposed to COVID-19. Wasn’t there an app for that?

OTTAWA – Public health officials have stopped tracking close contacts of people who test positive for COVID-19, saying they are overwhelmed as the number of cases increases.

They advise Canadians to pick up the phone themselves and advise people with whom they have been in contact to isolate themselves and monitor symptoms.

But wait, isn’t there an app for that?

Yes, the federal government’s COVID alert app still exists, says Carole Piovesan, a privacy attorney who co-chaired the advisory committee for mobile app use.

“I still have the app on my phone,” he said in an interview.

“He’s there. He’s active.”

And yes, he acknowledges, no one talks about it anymore.

The app was launched to much fanfare in June 2020 and was announced as an innovative way to detect the spread of COVID-19 in Canada and keep people safe.

But as of mid-December, only a fraction of mobile users in the country appear to have downloaded it, and even fewer have used it to signal strangers about their own COVID-19 status.

The problems, Piovesan said, began with overlapping jurisdictions.

“It has the federal government that operates the application, but the federal government depends on the province to help close the cycle on its effectiveness, because it needs the province to deploy the application,” he said.

Two provinces, British Columbia and Alberta, never adopted the app in the first place.

Those who did had to provide the one-time code that made it work: test positive, get a code, put it in the app, and then anyone who had been within six feet of that phone in the last 14 days would receive a notification about a potential exposure.

Difficulty obtaining the code became a sticking point, Piovesan said.

“If you have to call a hotline and wait two hours on the line, or wait 20 minutes or even 15 minutes, it is unlikely that you will,” he said.

“You are already afraid of having a positive diagnosis, it is possible that you have relatives who worry you, so you are already in a state of stress.”

And as the advisory council repeatedly recommended tweaks and changes that it believed could increase uptake of the app, the promise of an even more powerful weapon against COVID-19 loomed.

When the app was launched, it was months before the vaccines were distributed. But in December 2020, the first vials started arriving in Canada, and with that, the focus changed.

“I remember there was more pause in the PR campaign around using the app instead of really thinking about, well, what are other possible uses of the app in the fight against COVID,” Piovesan said.

“And since then, I haven’t heard much about it either.”

Health Canada said the app continues to be a useful tool.

“While the government of Canada is currently focusing advocacy efforts on vaccination and the use of rapid tests, it still recommends the use of COVID Alert even for people who have been vaccinated,” spokesman Alexander Beattie said in an email. .

How little the application is used is reflected in the data.

While it’s been Discharged more than 6.5 million times, that’s a far cry from critical mass in a country of 38 million people.

And the roughly 37,000 unique keys used to indicate an infection are dwarfed by the 1.9 million COVID-19 cases reported in Canada to date.

While some provinces, including Ontario, are still handing over the keys, Nova Scotia has just given up.

“When the federal government first announced the app, Nova Scotia Health provided the single-use codes, however the uptake was very low,” said Marla MacInnis, spokeswoman for the province’s health department.

“Given the increase in cases in Nova Scotia, the focus is on reporting the case and relying on them to notify their close contacts, whom they may have exposed to the virus.”

The advisory council was dissolved this summer (its members’ terms were only for one year) and its final reports have yet to be made public.