Bye bye covid app.
People who installed the NHS Covid-19 app in England and Wales have been receiving alerts informing them the platform has now shut down.
It was launched in 2020 as a tool to help fight the spread of Covid-19 by warning citizens if they had been near to someone who was infected.
It was downloaded around 30 million times during the pandemic.
Scotland and Northern Ireland had their own versions, which have also now closed.
The England and Wales app stopped working on Thursday and will disappear from Apple and Google’s app stores in May.
A ridiculous idea that cost the taxpayer unnecessary money.
The app was fraught with challenges. At one point its algorithm had to be tweaked after tens of thousands of people were receiving alerts every day telling them to self-isolate in case they were infected. This period was dubbed the “pingdemic”, and in one week in December 2021 the app sent nearly 700,000 notifications.
This problem was entirely foreseeable to anyone who thought about it for more than two seconds. It was a stupid idea to solve a problem that would largely resolve itself. And we paid for this cack.
However, research published in February suggested the app prevented about one million Covid cases, 44,000 hospitalisations and almost 10,000 deaths during its first year of use.
That ‘suggested’ is doing the kind of lifting you’d expect from a trans weightlifter in the women’s Olympics.
The authors of the peer-reviewed study said the research “shows that digital tracing apps have major potential for reducing transmission of [Covid-19] when combined with strong user engagement”.
Not my engagement and they will never have my engagement. Given that out of a population of nearly 70 million there were only 30 million downloads, says I’m not alone.
I would pledge allegiance to the Crown but not necessarily the wearer. Perhaps the answer would be to emulate pre war Hungary, a kingdom without a king, at least until a member of the extended Saxe Coburg Gotha/Windsor family showed a little common sense.
I think you are commenting on the wrong thread here, but nonetheless… I’m a bit of an old reprobate – I pledge allegiance to no one and nothing.
When a virus first appears there is a small window during which there is a small chance that it may be contained. Once the virus became endemic any attempts to prevent it from spreading are completely futile. The government must have consulted competent epidemiologists who told them exactly this. Instead of taking their advice they decided to pay “experts” with no principles to give them the answer that they actually wanted. The answer that gave them the go ahead to start throwing their weight about.
It didn’t prevent any cases because by the end everybody had had covid. It did make a few people stay home a lot and a lot of people stay home once before they got fed up with the constant pinging. Or so I understand, for my policy is not to download apps the government thinks I ought to have but apps I want, and they are few.