• These estimated that, in just three months, the app prevented 284,000 or 594,000 cases, respectively — despite only 28% of the population in those regions using it. The study also suggested that for every 1% increment in app usage, the number of cases could be reduced by 0.8% and 2.3%, respectively.

    The most compelling evidence yet, however, comes from an analysis published earlier this year of the usage and impact of the NHS COVID-19 app in its first year of deployment10. It found that the app prevented around one million infections and saved more than 9,600 lives in England and Wales between September 2020 and September 2021. And it achieved this even though, on average over the year, only around 25% of the population was using it (see ‘What the data say’).

    Honestly, I did think the contact exposure apps were a failure. I almost never got notifications, despite leaving them always on, and legitimately it sounds like adoption was low. But it sounds like they were still having a noticeable effect.

    •  edent   ( @edent@lemmy.one ) 
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      71 year ago

      I worked on the NHS Contact Tracing app. One of the worries was, if the alerts were too frequent, people would ignore them. There was a delicate balance between relevant notifications and “alert fatigue”.

      • Damn I’d love to have been a fly on that particular wall when the pandemic was happening, what was going on with the first app for example? I remember the government pushing ahead with it even though Apple didn’t permit bluetooth to be used in the way they wanted before admitting defeat and using the native mechanism for it anyway.

    •  prole   ( @prole@beehaw.org ) 
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      11 year ago

      Imagine how well it would have worked if more people used it.

      To everyone in this thread harping on potential privacy issues: how about the very real reality of several million dead people? Literal decimation of the population of the planet (by the original definition of the word). Should we just say “fuck them” because of some possible boogeyman?

  • Don’t worry. Republican led state legislatures have been striking down mask, shutdown, and social distancing laws, with little fanfare since we’re out of the pandemic. But when the next one hits, it’s going to be so much worse with the work they’re doing now.

  •  zik   ( @zik@aussie.zone ) 
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    21 year ago

    In a study in Australia it was found to have been almost useless in preventing infections while being heavily used by police to invade privacy.

  • I refused to use it and blocked it on my devices. I have zero trust in my government (France) when it comes to data. It’s both too incompetent and too prone to authoritarism to be trusted with anything like that.

    •  somefool   ( @somefool@beehaw.org ) OP
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      1 year ago

      I’m in Belgium. I kept mine faithfully on, because I wanted to be able to somewhat warn people I might have infected them (in the end, I never actually got covid, at least not with symptoms). After our next elections, however, I would need to make sure my privacy is respected. The polls are not looking good.

      The article’s call for a decentralized, open-sourced system handled by an organization of specialists is pretty much what I would hope for.

  • Here at home we refused to install it, we dont trust our goverment and seems like a control and surveillance app.

    At the time of COVID they thretened to make the app mandatory for everyone. People started to complain and our lovely prime-minister (portugal) shown its true colors by having an semi-dictatorial atitude, like “I am the one in charge and you do what I say”.

    People sem to forget it and still vote for him…