The federal government will close the COVID Alert app and may do so this week, government sources told CBC News.
Sources spoke to CBC News on condition that they would not be named because they were not authorized to discuss the issue in public. The Globe and Mail was the first to announce the news.
The phone app, launched in the summer of 2020, is designed to alert users to possible exposure to COVID-19. Users who have tested positive for the virus use a one-time key in the app to report their diagnoses. Their phones then exchange codes with other phones on which the app is installed and notify those who have been two meters away from an infected person for 15 minutes or more.
The federal government is encouraging the use of the app during the pandemic. The application does not collect personal information such as locations, addresses and telephone contacts.
COVID Alert has been downloaded only 6,893,423 times and only 57,704 one-time keys have been used to report infection, according to the government. Canada has registered 3.87 million COVID-19 infections and 41,000 related deaths since the pandemic.
Experts questioned the effectiveness of the application to limit the spread of COVID-19, saying much more downloads and information from users would be needed to make it work. The advent of the more infectious version of Omicron may also have impaired the ability of the application to track infections.
Users in British Columbia, Alberta, Nunavut and the Yukon cannot receive one-time codes for reporting COVID-19 infections. There was also confusion about whether the app worked.
The app costs $ 20 million. Most of that money – $ 15.9 million – was spent on promotion and advertising, while $ 3.5 million was spent on application development and maintenance.
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