Health Canada said Friday it will close its two-year COVID Alert tracking application after changes to testing rules in many provinces made it useless for many Canadians.
The Globe and Mail first announced the federal government’s plans earlier this week. The app was downloaded by only 6.9 million people at the time the federal government stopped publishing data for use last February.
In a press release Friday morning, Health Canada said the app will be decommissioned immediately and users can delete the app from their devices.
[Ottawa to announce the end of troubled COVID Alert app this week, sources say]
Proponents of careful government technology policy have spent the last few months campaigning in Ottawa, both publicly and in private, to close the application. Brenda McFaul, who monitors the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s privacy and technology practices, was previously in the Ottawa Advisory Group to monitor the application and sent a letter to staff in early May urging them to decommission it.
“Good governance of public technologies and responsible innovation require the government to manage and maintain the application for the entire duration of the project, including the termination of the application and the deletion of data related to it, now that it no longer serves the purpose,” Dr. McFaul wrote according to a copy of the letter she shared with The Globe and Mail.
COVID Alert relies on Canadians who have received positive notifications of infection from PCR tests to obtain one-time codes from health authorities and voluntarily upload them to the app. He then had to notify all other users who had been close to the infected person for more than 15 minutes.
But British Columbia, Alberta, the Yukon and Nunavut chose not to use the app, while Canadians uploaded only 57,704 codes by February, although the country was facing more than three million infections by then. Now that number is close to four million.
Interest in the app has plummeted further in light of the rise of COVID-19’s Omicron variant late last year. The swarm of infections has prompted many health authorities to stop relying on government-backed PCR tests and start spreading rapid antigen. The results of these tests at home are both less accurate than PCR tests and difficult, if not impossible, to collect from health authorities.
Ottawa has always planned to decommission the app when the pandemic stops, but rising new options and stagnant vaccination rates have forced governments around the world to move from trying to end the pandemic to learning to live safely with it.
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