State Public Health Deploying New COVID-19 Notification App on Sunday | Coronavirus

After a few weeks delay, a new app to help public health agencies track cases of COVID-19 is ready for the golden time on Sunday, October 25th.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment announced a Colorado exposure notification service Thursday morning. This service warns everyone who will be able to notify the app if they are near someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. According to Sarah Tuneberg, CDPHE’s special COVID-19 advisor, COVID-19 “knowing the potential for exposure helps people take immediate steps to limit their risk.”

The app, provided free of charge to the state by Google, will appear as a push notification on iPhone and Android phones on Sunday. If you have an iPhone, you can enable it in the Settings app. If you have an Android smartphone, you can find an app that you can download for free on Google Play. In both situations, the user must select Colorado as the location.The app will initially be available in English and Spanish

It works like this:

Mobile phones equipped with the app can exchange unidentified Bluetooth “tokens” that are updated from time to time. If you are diagnosed with COVID-19, your contact tracer will call you and ask you if you have the app. If yes, the contact tracer will send a link containing some questions and a text message to the person who exchanged the token with the published person.

Receiving notifications of potential exposure will be sent information about what to do next, including testing, quarantine, and contacting local public health agencies.

According to Tuneberg, this app has another advantage. People who are in contact with each other, such as being too close to the bus, but do not always know each other.

Privacy is a major concern for COVID-19, and according to Linux COVID-19 technology expert Jenny Wanger, this app does not collect, store or transmit personal information. It also does not track location like GPS does. Wanger explained that it was only Bluetooth and a series of random numbers.

With this app, no one needs to share a positive status for COVID-19, Tuneberg explained. If you take a positive test, you can choose to share the results anonymously. “We want people to control the experience,” Tuneberg explained. “You need to opt in to achieve the privacy protection we want.”

According to Wanger, all information is stored locally on the phone, so you don’t need to be connected to the internet more than once a day to renew your token.

If the state can enable the app on 15% of the population, it can reduce COVID-19 cases by 8% and deaths by 6%, Tuneberg said.

The three-week delay in launching the app in Colorado was to give CDPHE more time to work with 56 public health agencies (some counties). And two tribal health authorities.

The app is already in use in at least two states, Washington and Pennsylvania.Recent research by Oxford University For use in Washington, the app has been shown to play an important role in controlling the pandemic, even at low adoption rates. Tuneberg said he was excited to measure and evaluate how well the app works in Colorado.

The app will be part of the state’s “Swiss cheese” approach to disease management and prevention, Tünberg said. Nothing is 100% effective, but “you need to combine as many of these things as possible to fill the hole,” including tools such as wearing masks, washing hands, increasing social distance, and limiting meetings. The app complements what the state is doing with contact tracing.

According to Wanberg, in other states using the app, it’s more comfortable to share COVID-19 status with the app than to talk to a contact tracer. “For those who don’t want others to know their status, it could be a way to share their status anonymously with friends and acquaintances,” she said.

This app may also be useful for tourists coming to Colorado. Those who already have the app enabled in other states will be able to add Colorado to their location, Thunberg said. “We want people coming to Colorado to enable the service,” Thunberg said.

For more information, CDPHE has a new website. addyourphone.com..