3/18/2023 0 Comments Corona tracker iphoneOf those 11, three states have under 5% of their populations covered: Arizona, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The remaining 11 states with exposure notification apps fail to meet this benchmark for success. By this metric, 13 states-which together represent about one-third of the US population-have seen some degree of protection thanks to exposure notifications. That proportion is important: modeling studies have determined that if roughly 15% of a population opts into the system, it could significantly reduce a community’s covid case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths. Seven more states have over 15% of their populations covered. In four more states, more than 30% of residents opted in: Connecticut, Maryland, Colorado, and Nevada. Hawaii has the highest share of its population covered, at about 46%. Twenty-four states and DC shared user estimates, showing that, by early May, a total 36.7 million Americans have opted in to the notifications. Whether they choose to join those systems is another matter.Īs the vast majority of states do not publicly report user data, we reached out to state public health departments directly to ask how many people had opted into the technology. Still, over half of the US population can now get plugged in. Exposure notifications are only available for smartphone users and about 15% of Americans don’t have a smartphone, according to Pew Research Center. The state actually started work on its system back in May 2020-but legislators barred the public health department from any digital contact tracing work last summer due to privacy concerns, holding back development.Įven in the states where such apps are available, not everybody can use them. Massachusetts began testing its app with a pilot in two cities in April 2021, while South Carolina is currently running a pilot program at Clemson University. Virginia was the first state to make the technology publicly available to its residents in August 2020, while others are still only getting started now. We tracked exposure notification apps that had been rolled out in 25 states and the District of Columbia. A lack of public trust in new technology-coupled with a lack of resources in the public health agencies peddling that technology-hampered both adoption rates and how people used the systems.The technology has not been widely adopted, though some states are faring better than others.US systems were launched relatively late in the pandemic-when the country’s fall/winter surge was mostly already in progress.But our analysis does have a few takeaways: In the US, evaluation is made even harder by the fact that every state is basically doing its own thing. Studies are just now starting to come out about apps in the UK and Switzerland, for example. The effectiveness of these systems has been notoriously hard to evaluate. With the backing of the world’s two most dominant phone platforms, this system is the one that’s been most widely adopted, and is used by the vast majority of US states. The Apple-Google system prioritized privacy for users, anonymizing their data, and did not track users locations. The first wave of this system was designed by cooperatives of developers, most of whom ended up collaborating with Apple and Google to create a uniform standard.
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