Why do this at this late date? A year ago it would have been useful. Now, 59% of Massachusetts's population has been fully vaccinated. About 70% have at least one shot. A bit more pushing and they'll hit 80%, which seems to be about where the epidemic dies out for lack of new carriers.
> Why do this at this late date? A year ago it would have been useful.
Because it took time to develop, and now they just shipped it?
Maybe if the US had had a functional federal government prior to January then a national exposure notification app might have been developed, rather than relying on the states to do their own thing. Or not. But it's too late now.
I'm not a USAian so I don't know what the take-up of a federal government app would have been. Probably insufficient given what seems to be the ambient level of distrust and misinformation.
I've been running the UK/English NHS tracing app since the start of the second wave here, and I have no complaints. I'm happy with its approach to privacy, and that I've never had an alert from it despite living in a region with high covid incidence has been reassuring.
The US public has (ironically) a long history of being more wary about what their Federal government gets to know about them than the citizens of other nations.
A great example is the lack of any kind of proper federal identification service or registry, something that has been brought up several times over the past century and been met with mass public outcry. So instead we rely on social security numbers, which were literally designed to be bad at identification.
In general the status quo is that the states handle this stuff instead. Whether it be drivers licenses, school circiculums, road maintenance, and emergency responses to natural disasters. Pandemic response is no exception to this. Sure the Federal Goverment often provides funding and guidance but it's largely up to state governments to actually examine and enforce these guidelines.
The point I'm trying to get at here is a federal contact tracing app was never in the cards, regardless of who the President is. The Presidents powers are largely limited to transient international policy (diplomacy, tarrifs, war, border control) and various congress approved Federal agencies.
Only if coupled with a public health program that does something. We might reach the ring vaccination stage, where each case triggers contact tracing and testing and vaccination of all contacts and the people around them. That's how smallpox was wiped out.
> Only if coupled with a public health program that does something
Isn't that what this whole Massachusetts thing a step towards? But my point is that the public health program can't really do something when there's thousands of cases, but the lower case count means this can be effective once more.
As far as I can tell, you can't ring vaccinate for this. 1) SARS-CoV-2 vaccines don't work after exposure. 2) You don't have exceedingly obvious symptoms when you become infectious. 3) IFR is not that high for most people, and if they care about that they are already vaccinated. Smallpox is very different in all of those metrics, making ring vaccination possible. Pulse vaccination might work better, but only with vaccines that majorly reduce transmission for quite a long time (BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna, probably NovaVax), it's possible you would have to pulse J&J too often to be practical. Hopefully the original antigenic sin issue won't be so bad that re-targeting antibodies is not effective in most people, otherwise giving up on transmission control and trying to reduce deaths might be the only option, if new strains arise.
Why do most of the things governments have been doing about COVID? Not because they work or make sense, most of their policies were undermined by data showing ineffectiveness a long time ago.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/enable-massnotify-on-your-...