Failure to launch US phone Covid-tracking apps?

4 points

6 years ago

What's going on with phone based covid-tracking apps? Apple & Google have widely released bluetooth based tracking capabilities that need an app to leverage them, and in the US these seem to be state based. The US has a disgraceful national failure to have a countrywide plan for most cv19 issues. The Google & Apple strategy we have seems to be that each state makes their own app leveraging the infrastructure. My state (Washington) doesn't have an app as of now.

Only a few states have released them. Washington State people have been working on an app for a while; commoncircle.us seems to be their website, they have a github site that hasn't had a checkin for a couple of months. Is this effort dead? Their twitter account has nothing since July. Why isn't there an app available or any discussion?

Overview article of the US situation: https://gazette.com/health/people-proving-the-weakest-link-for-covid-tracking-apps/article_42a267c4-2aaf-11eb-85d8-cf1d8cde5661.html

Salon.com https://www.salon.com/2020/11/20/people-are-proving-to-be-the-weakest-link-for-apps-tracking-covid-exposure_partner/

UW engineering presentation about the effort by prof. Stefano Tessaro (Oct 2020) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geAIEwBOSRY&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=UWVideo

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