The Virginia Department of Health has launched COVIDWISE, an app that uses Apple and Google’s COVID-19 contact tracing technology to locate coronavirus cases and notify users when they may have been exposed. State officials had been making research on the app which is the first to fully use Apple and Google’s notification API.
COVIDWISE doesn’t use GPS to monitor a user’s location but uses Bluetooth to communicate across devices. After downloading the app selecting the Exposure Notifications System, it will generate anonymous beacons for your device. Other phones in the area receive and keep those beacons, and distribute their own. “No location data or personal information is ever collected, stored, or transmitted to VDH as part of the app,” VDH representative Julie Grimes told Virginia Public Media.
If an app user is coronavirus positive, a VDH official will give them a personal tag number that will be used to report the positive result to the app. Each day, phones with the app download a list of all the beacons associated with positive COVID-19 cases and check them against the list of beacons it has come across in the previous two weeks.
Participation in the app is voluntary. The more people download the app, the more effective it will be, Virginia health official Dr. Danny Avila told VPM. As the app could be helpful in letting people know whether they have come across any coronavirus case, it’s not a replacement for more extremely though forms of contact tracing that involve government obtaining an infected person’s information.
Virginia is the first state to use the exposure notification API. Some other states like Alabama, Dakota, and South Carolina have signed on to use it, but haven’t released the app in public yet. The app is very good and effective, If there is a match, the user is notified and given steps to keep themselves and those around them safe.
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