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“More than 600,000 people were told to isolate by the NHS covid-19 app in England and Wales during the week of 8 July,” he says, “but that’s only slightly more than double the number of new positive cases in the same country. period. While we are concerned about the rationale for the contact tracing app, it is unwarranted to criticize it for its ‘pingdemi’: the app actually works as usual.”

Christophe Fraser, an epidemiologist at Oxford University’s Big Data Institute, The most prominent studies on the effectiveness of the applicationsays there is another problem when working as designed: a significant disruption to the social contract. “People can see it on TV, there are raves and nightclubs. Why am I told to stay at home? Honestly, that’s a fair point,” he says.

He says it’s the lack of clear and fair rules that has led to widespread frustration as people are told to self-isolate. As we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, public health technology is deeply intertwined with everything around it—the way it’s marketed, the way it’s talked about in the media, the way it’s being discussed by your doctor, the way it’s supported (or not). by deputies.

“People want to do the right thing,” Fraser says. “They have to be met halfway through.”

how did we get here

Exposure reporting practices are a digital public health tactic pioneered during the pandemic, and they’ve already drawn a lot of criticism from those who say they don’t. sufficient to use. dozens of countries Apps created to warn users about exposure to covid, sharing code and using a jointly developed framework Google and Apple. But amid criticism for privacy concerns and technical glitches, malicious users claimed that apps were launched too late in the pandemic – at a time when case numbers were too high for technology to turn the tide.

So shouldn’t this be the right time for its implementation to make a real difference in the UK when technical glitches are fixed, adoption is high and a new wave is on the rise?

Not unless people voluntarily follow lockdown instructions, says Jenny Wanger, who leads covid-related tech initiatives for the Linux Foundation Public Health.

Eighteen months into the epidemic, he says, “technology is generally not a challenge.” “The science isn’t that hard… At this point we know how covid contamination works. The challenge comes around behavior. The hardest parts of the system are the parts where you have to convince people to do something – based on best practices, of course.”

Fraser from Oxford says he thinks of it in terms of incentives. For the average person, the incentives to stick to contact tracing rules — digital or otherwise — don’t always come together, he says.

The result of using the app says “You are quarantined but your neighbor who didn’t install the app isn’t quarantined,” “that doesn’t necessarily feel fair, does it?”