The returns have not been impressive. For an app promoted as a saviour for contact tracing purposes in the worst pandemic in a century, COVIDSafe is a lesson in exaggerated prowess and diminished performance.
It was billed as necessary and supremely useful. Prime Minister Scott Morrison was fashionably vulgar in linking the use of the app with an important goal: Getting watering holes opened.
鈥淚f that isn鈥檛 an incentive for Australians to download COVIDSafe, I don鈥檛 know what is鈥, Morrison in May last year. The prime minister even equated the use of the app to wearing sunscreen: 鈥淚f you want to go outside when the sun is shining, you have got to put sunscreen on. This is the same thing鈥.
Numerous organisations across Australia, private and public, jumped to the call in a concerted effort to embrace surveillance in order to suppress the virus.
The National Waste and Recycling Industry Council, to name one enthusiastic participant, that the COVIDSafe App, 鈥渢ogether with good hygiene, safe work practices and social distancing will help protect the health of waste and recycling staff and our committee鈥. Seven million people also seemed to agree in downloading the app.
But problems began to burgeon.
Identifying close contacts did not seem to be the app鈥檚 forte. There were issues with its performance on Apple devices. The , for instance, had a habit of trying to link with each device a user鈥檚 phone had ever been connected to.
New South Wales Health Minister Brad Hazzard in October last year that COVIDSafe had 鈥渙bviously not worked as well as we had hoped鈥. To this could be added that hovering cloud of privacy concerns and trust in government.
The review by consultants , commissioned by the federal government and delivered in March this year, did not make for pretty reading.
It took the persistence of The Canberra Times to of the report which had initially been released in severely redacted form. (The was rather more glowing in concluding that 鈥渢he COVIDSafe app was the correct tool to employ".)
The app, , had added to the workloads of state tracing teams 鈥渨ithout optimisation of benefits鈥. This included, for example, the presence of false close contacts among 205 individuals flagged by the app (some 61%), with 30% already identified through standard contact tracing.
A mere 2% of total close contacts in NSW between March and November had been detected by the app, with none in Victoria and Queensland.
COVIDSafe was costing as much as $100,000 a month to continue its operation by May.
Randall Brugeaud, chief of the Digital Transformation Agency, to Senate estimates, that the amount could increase to $200,000 a month 鈥渢o allow us to make future changes鈥.
These were additional totals to the $6.7 million the app had already cost till that point, most of which had been swallowed by development outlays.
Such costs are far from draw dropping, given the number of partners this crowded venture has involved. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform may well claim to have led the pack, but then came Delv, Boston Consulting Group and the Melbourne-based outfit Shine Solutions.
It in November last year that Shine Solutions had received $350,000 in increased payments from the government, bringing the then total to $2 million for work on an app that had, as yet, to identify any new close contact anywhere other than in the state of New South Wales.
Despite an entrenched stubbornness, a Department of Health report in July was forced to that it was 鈥渞are鈥 for contract tracers to use COVIDSafe. Moreover, a mere 779 people who tested positive for COVID-19 had availed themselves of the app.
COVIDSafe keeps company with several similar tracing apps that have been left behind in the wake of renewed infection waves and the discovery of vaccines. But that does not mean that their advocates have not stopped their fires of conviction.
A in the Journal of Medical Ethics insists that we should not have too many hang-ups on overly centralised data in terms of what risks it poses to privacy. Decentralised systems, argue the authors, are also inefficient and risky.
Any identifiable moral here must lie in the risk posed by zeal. COVIDSafe never replaced the sleuthing efforts of human contact tracers and may have even inhibited them.
鈥淭he lure of automating the painstaking process of contact tracing is apparent,鈥澛燼 from the Brookings Institute asserts. 鈥淏ut to date, no one has demonstrated that it鈥檚 possible to do so reliably despite numerous concurrent attempts鈥.
The authors even suggest that such apps can 鈥渟erve as vehicles for abuse and disinformation, while providing a false sense of security to justify reopening local and national economies well before it is safe to do so鈥.
Even now, on its long feted deathbed (and keeping company with a range of other feats of government misspending) you can still go to the Department of Health to see the following: 鈥淭he COVIDSafe app is a tool that helps identify people exposed to coronavirus (COVID-19). This helps us support and protect you, your friends and family鈥.
The belief in the role of this tool remains steadfast. The eyes, in the Morrison lingo, remain on the pub prize.
[Dr聽Binoy Kampmark聽lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He can be emailed聽at聽bkampmark@gmail.com]