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health employees reaching people by phone. And they say the technology has a role to play as Americans begin to travel again — and face the uncer- tain effects of virus variants.
“There is a possibility that we could have another spike in cases coming up later this summer or in the fall,” said Sam Gibbs, deputy secretary for tech- nology and operations at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
He hoped the state’s app would draw 500,000 people; it has been downloaded 785,000 times.
“This is a time where we don’t want to let our guard down,” Gibbs said. “We need to continue to be conscious of the disease even if we have been vaccinated.”
‘Even the perfect app
would have failed’
In spring 2020, as states began shoring up responses to the pandemic, state officials realized cellphone data could be used to track the spread of COVID- 19. Privacy advocates balked. Polling
showed Americans were divided on whether it was acceptable for the gov- ernment to use phones to track peo- ple who tested positive for the virus, according to the Pew Research Cen- ter. (The Pew Charitable Trusts funds the center and Stateline.)
In response to the public concern, Apple and Google forged an unlikely partnership to develop a form of digi- tal contact tracing with a tamer name: an exposure notifications system. The Bluetooth-based setup is opt-in only and anonymous.
When a person opts in to expo- sure notifications, their phone emits a signal that is exchanged with nearby phones that also have opted in to the system. If a person tests positive for the coronavirus and enters a code from a public health authority into the system, notifications are sent to people whose phones picked up the infected person’s signal in the previ- ous 14 days.
Codes change regularly, and the warnings are anonymous. You’re told you were possibly exposed but not
where and by whom.
Google’s Android phones use an
app that each user must download. Apple offers apps but also has inte- grated the exposure notifications sys- tem into its operating system. States can use that to send notifications to users, encouraging them to opt in without requiring them to download an app. Only public health authori- ties can activate the system.
“This was architected in a way to secure privacy,” Calo said. “They sacri- ficed the ability to effectively measure if it worked.”
According to state health depart- ments, the metrics available to states to gauge success are the number of people who download or activate the system, the number of times state-gen- erated codes are used to notify people of possible exposures and the number of exposure notifications that are sent.
Some state health officials acknowl- edge the shortcomings of the apps. Gibbs said North Carolina’s govern- ment is typically data-driven. “This particular program doesn’t give us
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