The Corona Warning App brought this to our neighbors – and so it continues

In the first months of the corona pandemic, more than three years ago, there were no vaccines. Experts mainly advised concerned citizens to protect themselves with face masks.

The German government and the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) also have high expectations of the Corona warning app, which appeared in the Apple and Google stores on June 16, 2020. Almost three years later – on June 1 – the federal government’s official Corona warning app goes into “sleep mode” and will not be developed further for the time being.

Time for a balance:

The app used Bluetooth signals to determine which smartphones were close to each other. If users tested positive for Corona, they could share the test result in the app, so that other users nearby would be warned with the well-known “red tile”.

The aim was to stop the chain of infection as quickly as possible by allowing alerted to respond quickly. They must then have themselves tested and possibly isolate themselves.

As of June 1, development will be completely stopped and the app will no longer be available in the App Store. You can still retrieve saved vaccination certificates, but you can no longer integrate them in the app. An extension of a deposited certificate is therefore no longer possible.

At the beginning of the debate, it was actually considered whether classical location information such as GPS should not be evaluated. However, this would not have made it possible to record a risky encounter with pinpoint accuracy. In addition, data protection officials warned that this would have created sensitive location profiles.

“The Corona-Warn app has shown how contact tracing can be successfully implemented anonymously, securely and without mass surveillance,” said Linus Neumann, spokesperson for the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), afterwards.

For downloads there are only binding figures, namely almost 48.7 million. Because a number of users have installed the app several times after changing mobile phones, for example, or have deactivated the app again, the number of active users is lower. According to estimates by the RKI, there should have been around 33 million at peak times.

This value is very high in an international comparison. However, the federal government had hoped that up to 60 percent of the population would use the app, so about 50 million.

A comprehensive scientific assessment of this issue is pending. But some figures are already certain: about nine million people have shared their test results via the Corona-Warn-App. PCR test results were sent to the app over 60 million times and rapid antigen test results were sent to users via the app over 180 million times.

According to experts, the app’s ecosystem has made an important contribution to the digitization of healthcare in Germany, for example at the health authorities or the test laboratories. Also new was that a large project with open source code was being developed.

“The Corona warning app was more than just a pandemic app,” says Bundestag member Anke Domscheit-Berg (left). “It was a great example of a new way of developing software for the public sector: as open source and in a truly open process, together with the competent civil society. Only in this way could it become the most successful Corona app in the world. »

However, Domscheit-Berg complains that the change did not last. Neither the old nor the new federal government has ever replicated this progressive approach in any other software project.

The final bill is also being processed. However, the cost is likely to exceed EUR 220 million, significantly more than originally planned.

The funds mainly flowed to the software group SAP and Deutsche Telekom (T-Systems) for the development and maintenance of the app and the operation of a call center for users.

Whether this effort was worth it is disputed. Andrew Ullmann, health policy spokesperson for the FDP parliamentary group, says: “The Corona alert app was not the game changer of the pandemic. Until now, no one can say exactly how many diseases they have prevented.”

But the app also contributed:

For Jürgen Müller, technical director of SAP, on the other hand, it is clear that the app, together with other tools, has made an important contribution to people in Germany “overcoming the pandemic together”. “For me, (the Corona warning app) is yet another proof that technology benefits everyone,” Müller wrote on the LinkedIn network.

German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) said active continuation of the operation made no sense “given the low incidence we currently have”. In addition, there is a high degree of population immunity, which means that the disease is no longer so serious.

The minister does call on users not to remove the app from their smartphone:

From the point of view of the World Health Organization (WHO), the fact that a new pandemic is imminent is not only a matter of time, but also of preparation. The UN health authority in Geneva is therefore closely monitoring a number of diseases that either have the greatest potential for epidemics or even pandemics, or for which adequate precautions have not yet been taken.

Think of well-known names such as Ebola, Zika, Covid-19 and Lassa fever, but also the respiratory diseases MERS-CoV and SARS. Also: Crimean Congo fever and Rift Valley fever, which can cause bleeding, and the Nipah virus, which causes meningitis.

At the bottom of the list is the ominous entry “Disease X”. This means a disease that has not yet been observed in humans and is therefore not yet known as a pandemic candidate. According to the WHO, 60 percent of all new infectious diseases are transmitted from animals to humans.

(t-online/dsc)