The French contact tracing application StopCovid "has not obtained the results" hoped for in the fight against the coronavirus, Prime Minister Jean Castex admitted on France Inter on Wednesday.
Asked about the government's lack of communication on this application launched in the spring, the head of government declared "to agree" that it had "not obtained the results we hoped for".
Not the “major tool in the fight” against Covid-19
But "we knew that testing life-size for the first time such tools in the case of this epidemic would be particularly difficult" and "we are not the only country to make this same observation", he added.
. @ JeanCASTEX: "StopCovid did not get the results we hoped for, perhaps due to lack of communication. At the same time, we knew in advance that testing such a tool on a full scale would be particularly difficult." # le79inter pic.twitter.com/Tdkn9Loiti
- France Inter (@franceinter) August 26, 2020“It is not the major tool in the fight” against the pandemic, continued Jean Castex. StopCovid was to allow its users to be warned if they have recently passed, within a meter and for more than 15 minutes, another user who has discovered himself infected with the coronavirus responsible for Covid-19.
Downloaded 2.3 million times
According to a recent tally from the Directorate General of Health (DGS), StopCovid has been downloaded 2.3 million times and some 1,500 people have reported a positive diagnosis.
When it was launched, the application was criticized by computer experts and lawyers, who saw it as a first step towards a surveillance society where our actions would be tracked permanently by automatic systems.
StopCovid was developed under the direction of the French computer science research institute Inria with the help of developers from private companies such as Orange and Capgemini.
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Coronavirus: StopCovid app downloaded 2.3 million times for 72 notifications
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Coronavirus: "Too early" to take stock of the StopCovid application, downloaded more than two million times
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