WA officials hope COVID app will offset contact tracing privacy concerns

Contact tracing is one strategy used to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, wherein if you have the virus, the state gives you a call and you let them know who you may have been in contact with over the past couple weeks. But it turns out a lot of people don’t want to do that.

So that’s why the state came up with something called WA Notify, an app that’s able to do contact tracing anonymously. Lacy Fahrenbach is the Deputy Secretary for the COVID-19 response with the Washington State Department of Health and joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss.

“This is an anonymous tool that adds to our response, and it protects privacy. It does not collect, track, or store location or personal information, but it helps us reach close contacts of cases potentially faster and potentially more of them than we can do with our traditional — but still important — case investigation contact tracing effort,” she said.

WA home prices continuing to rise, many moving away from urban areas

Presumably, if you signed up for WA Notify and were to pass within Bluetooth range of someone who has tested positive for COVID, you’d get a message on your phone.

“For any user who has enabled this on their phone, when you’re near another user who has it on their phone, your phones exchange completely anonymous codes through Bluetooth technology. And then when a user tests positive, they will get a random verification code that will notify any other user of the technology with whom they were in close contact with,” she said.

With two potential COVID vaccines on the way, some issues remain

“So an example is you might be taking public transportation somewhere, and you remember in your case interview that you did that. But you have no idea who was on the train with you. So this technology would help those people know that they were a close contact,” she explained.

Fahrenbach hopes the app will help offset those uncomfortable with the privacy implications of contact tracing.

“We, too, have had reluctance for members of the public to participate in the process or to identify who their close contacts are. And that’s another really great place where this tool can come in,” she said. “So if we at least get the case interview and the case doesn’t want to tell us who their close contacts are, they could still inform their close contacts anonymously through the use of this technology.”

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

Follow @http://twitter.com/Mynorthwest