Just 6% of positive cases being notified to Covid tracker app

Going by the HSE’s own usage numbers for the application, which stands at 1.3m users, at least 10,455 cases could or should have been uploaded during September, suggesting a shortfall of expected cases of 94%. Photo: Leah Farrell/Rollingnews.ie

Despite mounting concern over the spike in Covid-19 cases, just 6% of positive cases are being notified by the Covid Tracker App.

So few positive cases are now being notified via the app, which was launched in July 2020, that the overall viability of the project has been called into question.

Between September and October 2021 just 571 positive cases were notified - that is all close contacts being uploaded to the HSE automatically by the user - by the app, according to the HSE’s own data as collated by Stephen Farrell and Doug Leith of Trinity College’s school of science and statistics.

Going by the HSE’s own usage numbers for the application, which stands at 1.3 million users, at least 10,455 cases could or should have been uploaded during September, suggesting a shortfall of expected cases of 94%.

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The shortfall in notifications has been growing in size since October 2020, when the figure was 56%. Between January and July of this year the figure stood at between 85% and 86%, before jumping to 92% in August 2021 as the latest wave of the coronavirus began to take hold.

Policy officer with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties Olga Cronin said that while her organisation had “commended the good faith efforts” of the HSE and the Department of Health in publishing the source code for the app before its inception, there has nevertheless been “no public data or evidence that the HSE app would work”.

“We still haven’t seen any evidence that the Covid Tracker app has helped to curb the transmission of Covid-19,” Ms Cronin said.

“Our right to privacy shouldn’t be sacrificed in the name of a tech solution, and if such a so-called solution is ineffective, it should be wound down. Otherwise the deployment of ineffective technologies will erode public trust and undermine future efforts to implement solutions,” she added.

The HSE had not responded to a request for comment on this matter at the time of publication.

The initial Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) for the Covid Tracker stated that an assessment of the app’s effectiveness could take place no earlier than six months after its deployment, with evaluation criteria such as the number of contacts identified, levels of uptake, and the prevalence of Covid-19.

It is as yet unclear if such a review has ever taken place.

“You would probably imagine that the HSE knows it’s not working particularly well,” Stephen Farrell told the Irish Examiner. “But this is not a particularly new trend. The app wasn’t working well six months ago either,” he said.

The Covid Tracker was given an additional purpose earlier this summer when an option was created to upload a user’s vaccine certificate to it for ease of access.

The app, just one of many bluetooth-dependent solutions created by separate nations in a bid to manage the early months of the pandemic, had a baptism of fire in August 2020 when it was revealed it had been deleted over 500,000 times, primarily due to a glitch on the Android version which saw the battery of phones rapidly depleted leading to a rash of uninstalls.