At 8 months, Google’s Covid Exposure API used in about 18 states
Google’s Covid-19 exposure API (and Apple’s as well,) was an anonymous bluetooth beaconing tool that could tell you if you’ve been around someone who later tested positive for Covid-19 anonymously. It has thus far been adopted by health apps in only 18 US states, and one territory.
Not to say 18 states are using it, many states are listed where only a local health department in a city is using it. So yeah. Let’s keep those contact tracers working trying to cover the tracks of an average of 200,000 cases a day at this point.
It wasn’t perfect, and people who weren’t programmers maybe had some legit privacy concerns (although they should have those concerns with the phone to begin with,) but it could have saved hundreds of millions of dollars in testing and maybe made a dent in the infection curve.
Check and see how limited the rollout is in your area.
[Google Blog]
