Without A Trace

at

From top: The Guardian, July 2020; Stephen Donnelly (right), Minister for Health, and Paul Reid, Chief Executive Officer, HSE, launching the HSE Covid Tracker App on July 7, 2020

This morning.

Via Irish Times letters

The article “Covid tracker app used by few to identify close contactsmay lead some to believe that individuals are to blame for the low usage of the HSE Covid app for contact tracing (“Only 20,946 had used the Government app for the purpose for which it was intended by uploading close contacts”).

The likely reason that people aren’t using the HSE’s contract tracing app for contact tracing is, ironically, because the HSE won’t let them. A six-digit code from the HSE is required in order to automatically notify any close contacts.

I recently got Covid and this code wasn’t provided to me by the HSE. I couldn’t use the app to notify close contacts, even though I wanted to.

The HSE should be giving these codes to every infected person. If it isn’t, why not? How often are they being given out? How many people that have been given a code successfully uploaded their contact tracing data?

The Covid tracker app isn’t being used to anywhere near its full potential.

Only the HSE can tell us why.

Nick Bell, Dublin 8.

Anyone?

Irish Times Letters

RollingNews

Sponsored Link

13 thoughts on “Without A Trace

  1. Riddled

    Yea, I got the lurgy just before Chirstmas and was sent a HSE website link to upload my close contacts manually – 29 in all, but I had been around a lot of other people who were not known to me including restaurant staff – on the day I caught covid (I know exactly where I caught it as I was limiting my activities in the days running up to Christmas and was only out once. For context, I’m double vaxed and caught covid 6 days before I got sent my booster appoitment). I tried using the code for the close contact manual upload website on the app but, as your person above states, it didn’t work.
    I decided to delete the app after that, if it’s not doing the one thing is claims to be made for, then what on earth is the point.
    I hope none of the workers in the service sector I encoutered that day caught covid from me or the friend who gave it to me and I really hope they didn’t bring it home for Christmas not knowing the had it while their tracker app sat silently in their pocket. My friend was able to let me know he had tested positive 2 days after we met because he took an antigen test, confirmed by PCR within 48 hrs. The HSE contacted me to officially inform me I was a close contact 4 days after my friend’s positive PCR. Luckily I was already restricting my movements and only gave it to the one other person in my household.

    1. Riddled

      I went to a funeral but otherwise saw nobody that week. We did antigen tests beford and after, thankfully our patient zero spotted it and alerted us in good time. He must have just gone symptomatic as he was clear the morning of. HSE contact tracing was next to useless bar getting a free box of antigen tests after I had already tested positive by PCR.

    2. Micko

      You don’t.

      But hasn’t that been the issue forever?

      Lots of folks who took all this very seriously, thinking they are following “the rules” while (some) simultaneously condemning others for their behaviour.

  2. SOQ

    Trace and trace is completely useless once a virus becomes widespread. It would be impossible to track all of the contact activity last Saturday for example.

    As for the app- it is no surprise that it doesn’t work or that the admin was not suffice to maintain it- it’s the HSE for goodness sake. As managers go, they’d make good hairdressers.

    No offence meant to hairdressers- obviously.

  3. scottser

    a nice lady from the hse rang me to enquire of my close contacts when i got covid.
    i think they had given up on the app a long time ago.

  4. :-Joe

    Why 20k+ or anyone would want their medical data, let alone any of their personal data being handed over to the likes of facederp and gurgle and their API partnership to experiment on for profit is just basic level insanity to me…

    The app was never going to work because it was not created by a trustworthy developer to be open-source, secure, private and pseudonymous in it’s use and in how it manages user data.

    It should have been funded and regulated at the State/ EU level and not handed over in the trust of the corporate ‘murican geo-political military state controlled, silly-con valley, techno-feudalist elites.

    More proof that Android/iOS apps are mostly shiite, 99%+ anyway…

    :-J

Comments are closed.

Sponsored Link
Broadsheet.ie