Health Canada announced on Friday that the COVID Alert application has been discontinued, citing low usage, falling cases and hospitalizations, and a lack of PCR testing in Canada.
As of June 17, the app will no longer provide exposure notifications, and Health Canada says users can now delete the app.
The app has been downloaded just 6.9 million times and 63,117 positive tests have been registered since it launched in July 2020. British Columbia, Alberta, Nunavut and the Yukon have also refused to participate in the app.
Infectious disease expert Dr Isak Bogoc called the app a “good idea at the time”, but said that after six to eight months, low absorption means that the app “will not actually be an effective tool”.
“It will be difficult to actually measure the real impact of the application, and unfortunately it was probably not as good as we wanted it to be,” Bogoc told Your Morning on CTV on Friday. “The application has been downloaded on just under seven million devices, which is not enough for something like this to be effective. You really need approximately 60 to 70 percent of the population to have an application like this. “
The app works by tracking other users who have been close to you using Bluetooth signals. Users who have passed a positive PCR test can receive a one-time key to enter the application and alert other users that they have been in close contact with a positive case.
This process was sometimes divided. If a user has been in a jurisdiction that has not automatically issued a key, he or she must contact the local public health department for one.
However, as most provinces now limit the eligibility of the PCR test to healthcare professionals, hospital patients, long-term carers and others who are considered to be at higher risk, the majority of consumers who become infected with COVID- 19, were not able to receive a one-time key because the keys are not given after a quick test, which further reduces the efficiency of the application
As early as December, John Hagi, Newfoundland and Labrador’s health minister, told reporters that the federal government had “abandoned” the application months ago, although Hagi later withdrew his comments and Health Canada reiterated the federal government’s commitment. to the application at that time.
In March, Manitoba also stopped using the app and no longer distributes one-time keys. Alberta has its own contact tracking application known as ABTraceTogether, but the province has announced that it will be decommissioned on June 23.
To address privacy concerns, the federal government said the app had no way of knowing the user’s location, name, address, phone contacts and personal information of other users of the app who were in the immediate vicinity.
When the app was first launched, federal privacy commissioners and Ontario reviewed the app and gave their support, saying it was “designed with robust safeguards to protect users’ identities.”
Bogoch believes some of the steps designed to protect Canadian privacy, such as making the app voluntary, may have hindered its success. In Singapore, the acceptance rate of the COVID contact tracking application in the country is 92 percent, as the use of the application was mandatory for entry into many public places.
“This app involves people who have to download it and then have to report that they really had COVID,” he said. “It’s probably not the best way to start it. I’m not even sure if an application-based approach like Canada would be a good idea in terms of an effective way to track contacts just because we value our privacy. “
But despite poor implementation of the application, Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr Teresa Tam, said it was still important to innovate like this during a public health challenge.
“Not all innovations can work in different populations, but I think it’s good to try to use another tool in the current era of applications to protect the population,” she told reporters during a COVID-19 media briefing on Friday. in the afternoon.
Health Canada says all data from the app will be deleted, except for aggregate performance indicators that do not contain personal data.
With files from Sarah Turnbull from CTVNews.ca and The Caandian Press.
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