Is Canada’s Covid-19 Alert app a failure? You be the judge

The NPC Healthbiz Weekly is here to keep on informing you through 2021. It's your weekly briefing on topics pertinent to healthcare marketers and executives published in cooperation with Peak Pharma Solutions. 

⇒ Issue #195 (In numerology, 195 symbolizes the end of certain stages in your life.)
⇒ Worldwide Covid cases as of 06/10: 174,462,353*
⇒ Worldwide Covid fatalities as of 06/10: 3,759,101*
⇒ Confirmed Covid cases in Canada as of 06/10: 1,404,443*
⇒ Confirmed Covid fatalities in Canada as of 06/10: 25,816*
⇒ Number of vaccine doses administered to Canadians as of 06/10: 27,257,774*

June 10, 2021—It’s Thursday, and welcome to a new edition of the CurveFlattener. Today, Editorial Director Allan Ryan brings you the latest news from the secret Chronicle base camp deep in the Effingham Short Hills of Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula. 

The Canadian federal government launched the Covid-19 Alert app with much fanfare on July 31, 2020. The app was designed to notify Canadians whenever they spent more than 15 minutes within a two-metre vicinity of someone who had been diagnosed with Covid-19 in the previous two weeks. 

Based on Bluetooth technology, the app's value was in doubt from the outset due to a variety of complicating factors. One, both parties need to have downloaded and installed the app on their mobile phones. Two, anyone with a positive Covid-19 test had to acknowledge that positive test on the app on their phone.  

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at the time of the app launch that a 50% acceptance rate was necessary for the program to be effective. Doubts about reaching that lofty percentage circulated when B.C., Alberta, Nunavut and the Yukon did not even sign on to the program. Still, the feds shrugged and forged ahead, fashioning a budget of $16 million for the promotion of the app.

But now, more than 10 months after its launch, the reviews of the Covid-19 Alert app are mixed. It turns out that the percentage of mobile phone users who downloaded the app was only about 19%, less than half Trudeau’s goal of 50%. Even more concerning, fewer than 2% of people with coronavirus let the app know they had tested positive.

According to this CTV report, the app has been downloaded 6,548,411 times, and 33,168 one-time keys have been entered to trigger notifications as of May 25.

Dr. Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist in Toronto, says those numbers are “ludicrously” low but not shocking given the app's design.

“[The Covid-19 Alert app] is so designed for privacy, it creates a bit of a creepy feel to it and also if you get an alert…it doesn’t tell you when you were exposed, it doesn’t tell you when to get tested, all it does it create stress, it’s basically an alarm that says be stressed right now.”

Dr. Furness said the federal government should focus on helping provinces improve testing and contact tracing rather than sinking any more funds into the Covid Alert app.

“When we only see a small percentage, in this case under 10 per cent, under five per cent, of the population using these apps, they’re essentially completely useless,” Dr. Craig Jenne, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Calgary, told Global News.

In Saskatchewan, just over one in 20 people who tested positive for Covid-19 used the Alert app.

“That’s pretty abysmal, isn’t it? That’s a failure of the app itself,” said Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy professor Dr. Tarun Katapally in this Star Phoenix article. 

“What else can we say about that?”

The NPC Podcast is back for another season. The National Pharmaceutical Congress organizers are proud to release our new weekly podcast series, hosted by Peter Brenders. Peter's guest this week is Dr. Len Walt, VP Medical at SSI Strategy. Listen here now, or download the episode and play it at your convenience. The NPC Podcast is presented in cooperation with Impres Pharma.

COVID CHRONICLE 06/10/2021

• In a study that examined almost 47,000 U.S. healthcare workers, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic have determined the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech) are 97% protective. The researchers also found that just one vaccine dose was 89.2% effective within just seven days. They are hopeful that this research on the efficacy of the vaccines will help to allay fears and vaccine hesitancy among some groups of people.
  
• A laboratory study in mice indicates that metformin could be a promising treatment for Covid-19-related lung inflammation. A multi-institution team led by researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine identified the molecular mechanism for the anti-inflammatory activity of metformin and, in mouse studies, found that metformin prevents pulmonary or lung inflammation in mice infected with the virus.
  Over the past year, several other retrospective clinical studies reported that metformin use by diabetic and obese patients before hospital admission for Covid-19 correlated to reduced severity and mortality. “The clinical studies were plagued by confounders that made conclusions hard to reach. As a result, there was some skepticism in their findings,” said corresponding study author Michael Karin, Ph.D., from the UC San Diego School of Medicine in this press release. “And because metformin is an out-of-patent, low-cost drug, there is little impetus to conduct large-scale trials, which are quite expensive.”
  The study was published online on June 8, 2021, in the journal Immunity. 
  
  
• Brain health is affected by Covid-19 in the long term, according to a Pan-Canadian survey of over 1,000 Covid long haulers. The survey results, conducted by Viral Neuro Exploration (VINEx), COVID Long Haulers Support Group Canada, and Neurological Health Charities Canada (NHCC), are consistent with other similar studies. Cognitive impairment or “brain fog” was among the top reported symptoms, along with fatigue, shortness of breath, headaches, dizziness and anxiety. According to the researchers, over 80% of respondents experienced symptoms for more than three months, and almost 50% experienced symptoms for 11 months or more.
• 
  

WHAT WE’RE READING TONIGHT

There has been a lot of chatter about Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Written in 1722, more than 50 years after the plague-ravaged London, it seemed like it would be timely reading, especially since a free edition is available from Project Gutenberg.

Turns out that downloading the book file was not so simple since the memory on my phone was at its max, taken up by programs like, oh, the Covid-19 Alert app discussed earlier in this article. I had downloaded the Alert app when it became available last summer, mainly because I was curious. But, checked periodically over the past 10 months, the app never reported anything other than No Exposure Detected! (sic). That was either good news or a sign the app wasn’t working properly. So, today, with the download of A Journal of the Plague Year pending and a realization that the Alert app was hogging nearly 50 megs of the phone’s memory, the Alert was sent to the trash bin. 

Tonight, it will be the right time to settle in with Defoe’s tale.

HERE’S TO FRIDAY

Tomorrow, publisher Mitch Shannon will be back at the keyboard. On Monday, watch for the Skin Spectrum Weekly e-newsletter, and on Tuesday, the NPC Healthbiz Weekly will be distributed. So go ahead and subscribe through the links above, at no charge.