Thought of the Day - November 30 - BC's Contact Tracing App

BC is the only province without a COVID alert app. Alberta has retained the one they developed early in the year and the rest of Canada, apart from BC, has rolled out the Canadian Alert app. Not that the app is a panacea, its adoption rate has not been great (only 5 million have downloaded, and about 3,500 positive case codes uploaded), it only runs on current OSes and so may not be available to all ( Thought of the Day - September 28 - COVID Alert App ).

But in these times, every little helps. Indeed, as I mentioned yesterday in the shout-out, Ontario is doing a little better than in the last wave, meaning they are doing a few things better, one of which is they were first adopters of the app.

When Bonnie Henry was asked last month as to why BC is not using the Canadian App, she said that it:

• was not specific enough, for example it will not flag the location and time of an "encounter". However, the app had to be designed that way from the start, to address privacy concerns. Indeed BC is one of the provinces that does not disclose specific location of case (just aggregates by health region) to avoid just such privacy concerns.

• alerts for too long, 14 days after a diagnosed person enters their code in the app. Yes, like quarantine, it is better to be safe than sorry.

So I am now scratching my head as to the real reason that BC does not want to endorse the Canadian Alert app, or even consider the Alberta-developed app. The only reason I can come up with is that BC lacks testing capacity. Like airplane, business or institutional outbreak alerts, they burden the testing capacity, usually with a yield of only a few percent. This means that 50 or so people are needlessly tested for each case that is found. Unfortunately, BC has one of the lowest public testing capacities in Canada. Also, a significant percentage of testing has been siphoned off for the film industry. Thus we may not be able to keep up with dozens more daily alerts.

So while BC believes contact tracing is important, heck we just hired another 600 people to help out, it looks like a contact tracing app will not be happening in BC.

Cheers

Cliff