Canadian Government to End Use of COVID Alert App ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Josh O’Kane, the Globe and Mail:

Ottawa is planning to announce the shutdown of the national COVID-19 contact tracing app this week, months after changes to PCR testing regulations in many provinces had rendered it largely useless across much of Canada.

[…]

The COVID Alert app’s death has been a protracted one. By several metrics, it did not achieve what it was designed to do. Only 6.9 million of Canada’s 38 million residents had downloaded it by last February – which is when Ottawa stopped publishing usage numbers – and Canadians entered only 57,704 codes declaring they had COVID.

COVID Alert is the national exposure notification app built on the troubled joint Apple–Google framework. This is not a success story by any measure, but it is good to see the federal government winding it down to prevent misuse.