TousAntiCovid has just lost its main functionality, the one for which it was developed: contact tracing. This feature has never had a decisive role in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
A page turns in the history of TousAntiCovid. The central functionality of the mobile application and in theory the most important, which was used for “contact tracing”, has not been operational since January 25, 2023. Since this date, the option which was used to activate or deactivate this parameter is inaccessible to Internet users. People who are positive for the coronavirus can therefore no longer report themselves through this system.
Contact between smartphones, via Bluetooth
Contact tracing, or contact tracing in French, was a mechanism aimed at alerting the entourage of a sick person. The general idea was to have a tool to easily inform individuals who have come into contact with someone infected with the coronavirus, according to criteria of proximity (one meter distance) and duration (at least fifteen minutes). If these two conditions are met, then there is a risk of exposure to the disease.
Contact tracing could be done in the classic way, via a survey conducted by telephone by Health Insurance, or by Bluetooth connection. In the latter case, you had to have installed the TousAntiCovid application (whose previous name was StopCovid) on your smartphone and validate many prerequisites for it to work. But all these prerequisites constituted so many potential obstacles to the success of contact tracing on smartphones.
A silly example: if you use the TousAntiCovid application and you provide everything you need to transmit your medical condition “anonymously”, your metro neighbor on the jump seat next door will not know. never anything if he does not use the application himself. In this case, the Bluetooth link will go nowhere. There were plenty of difficulties of this nature. Another example: not everyone has a smartphone.
In addition to the information message visible in the application when it is already configured, TousAntiCovid presents another message during its installation. It is stated that this functionality will end on January 31 (so it is cut a little early), in order to comply with the law. The message here refers to the law of July 30, 2022 putting an end to the exceptional regimes created to fight against the epidemic linked to covid-19.
This closure was also confirmed on January 26 by BFM-TVwho spoke with the development team.
Delete data locally and on servers
The removal of this functionality is justified in view of the current dynamics in the face of the pandemic. Almost 80% of the French population is on a full vaccination schedule and 56% on a booster dose. Positive cases have been plummeting since mid-December as have hospital deaths, critical care admissions and the number of patients in hospital. No extension of the exceptional health regimes has been taken.
Apart from the end of contact tracing on mobile, other arrangements are made: first, ” the erasure of contact tracing data stored locally, as well as the deactivation and deletion of statistical data on these same devices “. In short, everything is supposed to have been deleted on the smartphone of people still using TousAntiCovid. And on January 31, a second wave of neutralization will take place.
Not only will TousAntiCovid’s central servers no longer collect anything from users’ proximity history, but in addition ” data related to contact tracing functionality and app statistics will have been removed from central servers “. These same servers are also going to be “ dismantled “, indicate our colleagues. The application will continue to work, but on its peripheral functionality.
It is also because TousAntiCovid has turned into a “hub” that it has ended up becoming widely used. You could turn it into a briefcase to store your certificates (vaccination, negative test, recovery), you could read health recommendations, you could find nearby vaccination centers, you could have key figures around of the epidemic and vaccination and we could have news. Among others.
On the other hand, the impact of contact tracing by Bluetooth with TousAntiCovid on the fight against the pandemic remained incidental. A ” marginal utility “Wrote, for example, the National Commission for Computing and Freedoms (Cnil). Same thing for the impact study commissioned by the Ministry of Health. However, significant resources have been committed to convince the population to switch to TousAntiCovid.
It remains to be seen when TousAntiCovid will disappear for good, as promised by the government.
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