Cyprus Mail 30 May 2020 -by Andrew Rosenbaum
Switzerland, on Thursday, said it is the first country to begin general usage of a contact-tracing app that enables location fixing for those infected with the novel coronavirus.
The Swiss are launching the app in a pilot programme that includes a hospital workers, civil servants, and Swiss army personnel. After a few weeks, the programme will be rolled out across the entire country if the results of the pilot are satisfactory.
The app, called SwissCovid, works with technology based on APIs (a kind of software access code) written by Google and Apple, and intended for use in the respective smartphones. At least 22 countries are basing their contact-tracing technologies on the Google and Apple APIs. It isn’t yet clear if this will mean new profit for the two tech giants, but it clearly extends their influence.
Although it won’t extend to the UK: Perfidious Albion is determined to develop its own technology, although controversy is rife around it because of privacy concerns. The UK will also recruit about 18,000 workers to manually trace contact finding out who they might have spread the disease to and following up with those contacts to ensure they don’t continue the chain of transmission.
The Apple-Google technology is Bluetooth-based, as it can provide near-real-time reporting and alerts in a way that GPS can’t, research has shown. Bluetooth was not developed for this kind of large-scale distance measurement. Government teams have had to work closely with Apple and Google, because making the app work requires specialised engineering skills and techniques.
Users carry their smartphones, and when they pass a person who has been exposed, it picks up what is called an exposure notice. Users, however, don’t have access to that notice. The system notifies a user of exposure only if there is real danger of contamination – for example, being squeezed together in a public bus, but not if you are walking past a few yards away.
To work, however, the app requires take up of 60 per cent.
A further challenge to the app’s functioning is that many older or cheaper smartphones don’t have what it takes to make the app work. In affluent Switzerland, this is less of a challenge, but could well become a serious issue in France or Denmark, for example.
The Australian government has taken the UK approach, producing an app that would work in tandem with manual tracing. But the take up was too low; it did not reach even 40 per cent of the population. Australian is considering switching to the Apple-Google approach. As that app can be easily downloaded and used, it is more likely to reach the critical mass needed to make contract tracing possible.
The Swiss will be the first to encounter the inevitable bugs and glitches that accompany any software rollout. Smartphones and the apps on them were not originally designed for this kind of application. No doubt, once the Swiss obtain results from the pilot programme, they will share them with other countries.
And, for Apple and Google, these projects are good for reminding us all how much we’ve come to need them.
