Key Points
- Health Minister Mark Butler has revealed that $21 million was spent by Australian tax payers on the application.
- Only two positive COVID-19 cases not found by manual contact tracers were identified through the app.
The COVIDSafe app is dead.
The application former Prime Minister Scott Morrison once compared to the “sunscreen” for COVID-19 and a “ticket" to Australians getting their lifestyle back from the bleak days of COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns has been decommissioned.
The decision ends the life of the application, much maligned over concerns the $21 million spent by Australian taxpayers to keep it going outweighed its effectiveness as a method of contact tracing to help in containing the spread of the pandemic.
Only two positive COVID-19 cases were identified through the app which were not found by manual contact tracers since it launched in April 2020, according to government data.
The application also only identified 17 close contacts that hadn’t been identified through other tracing methods.
Health Minister Mark Butler has described the application as a “colossal waste” of taxpayers' money.
“It is clear this app failed as a public health measure and that’s why we’ve acted to delete it,” he said in a brief eulogy.
“The former prime minister said this app would be our 'sunscreen' against COVID-19 – all it did was burn through taxpayers' money.”
It wasn’t accurate enough in the way it was counting cases
The application was developed by the former Morrison government as a tool to assist state and territory health officials to identify and contact people who may have been exposed to COVID-19.
Opposition spokesperson for health Senator Anne Ruston said the unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 threat needed to be considered in evaluating the application's overall effectiveness as a public health response.
“Hindsight is a great thing, but the Labor Opposition at the time supported the development of the COVIDSafe app as an additional protection for the Australian community during the pandemic," she said.
COVIDSafe's death was announced in the App Store
The COVIDSafe app had been modelled on a similar approach adopted by Singapore’s government and developed by the Department of Health and government body the Digital Transformation Agency.
The application was designed to record contact users had had with other users to show potential close contacts to health officials by linking this information to a database.
In total 7.9 million people registered with the COVIDSafe app between April 2020 and May 2020.
But fewer than 800 users consented to their data going to the National COVIDSafe Data Store for contact tracing, according to government data.
The application store where the software is downloaded has been updated to reflect its retired status, explaining on Wednesday it had been “decommissioned”.
The COVIDSafe app is seen in an application store. Source: Supplied
This found that between May and November 2020, from approximately 25,300 close contacts, the app detected just 17 additional close contacts which were not identified through conventional contact tracing methods (under 0.1 per cent of all cases).
Dr Haire said their research had shown the application had not proven effective enough for use by contact tracers.
“It wasn’t accurate enough in the way it was counting cases, so on the one hand it was over counting people who weren’t actually in the kind of proximity so an interaction could occur and other the other hand it was missing cases,” she told SBS News.
“The main takeaway from this is you need to have real-world testing of technologies like this.”
The application operated by recording interactions between users who had been within 1.5 metres of a positive case for 15 minutes or more.
If a user tested positive for COVID-19, they were asked to consent to upload their interaction data for use by contact tracers.
But Dr Haire said their research had shown Android phones had a tendency to register contact between users too far away for infection to occur, while iPhones often didn’t recognise interactions.
A Senate inquiry’s report, released in October, found the government had estimated the monthly maintenance costs of the COVIDSafe app to be between $60,000 and $75,000.
Dr Suranga Seneviratne from the University of Sydney School of Computer Science said his research had found users had nothing to worry about their privacy being infringed by using the app.
But he added that there were legitimate questions about its effectiveness.
“The fundamental problem we had was bluetooth by design was not designed for something like this,” he told SBS News.
“Definitely there are quite a bit of lessons to be learned from this case and in future how do we use it.”
