The NHS tracking program has been instrumental in reducing the spread of coronavirus in the UK, a peer-reviewed paper found.
Investigators estimate that the app has prevented hundreds of thousands of cases of disease, and thousands of deaths.”On average, every confirmed case that has agreed to be informed of its app contacts has protected one new case,” the newspaper said.
The study was approved for publication by the journal Nature.Some of the investigators were also involved in developing the NHS tracking system, and had previously issued other estimates.
But the inclusion of Environment means that this paper has now been reviewed by peers by other scholars. We have been made available as a preview of the papers to be released.
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Millions of notifications
This paper covers the period between the launch of the application on September 24 last year until the end of 2020. It was used “regularly” by 16.5 million people – about 28% of the UK population, the study said.
It works by using smartphone sensors to measure how close a user is – and for how long – to other users of the app. If one of those people tests for coronavirus, the app can issue a warning telling those who were closest to isolating themselves.
It sent about 1.7 million “disclosure notifications” after 560,000 app users were tested for it, the study paper said.They estimate that each increase in app users has led to a reduction in cases between 0.8% and 2.3%.
The difference between the two numbers fell into the two different methods the team used to calculate the impact of the application.
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The first used the “modeling” approach, making the reflection on the transfer and how people clung to the separation. The second involved looking at information from local authorities in actual cases. Both are compared to how much an app has been used to measure its impact.
Investigators say the total number of banned cases was 284,000 in the modeling process, and 594,000 used these statistics. That translates to 4,200 or 8,700 preventing consecutive deaths.”On balance, the magnitude of the effect between these two measures seems probable,” the researchers said.
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App Awareness
But they also noted that there could be another “real, though unintentional,” effect of the app.
They suggested that “users [could] keep a greater distance from others than they could, knowing that the app monitors the distance and could later advise separately.”This could mean that our model ratio … is very low, and our [high] figure is accurate,” he suggests.
The research paper also revealed details on how the app was used.It was widely used in areas that were “very rural, with very little poverty”, and the effect on reducing transfers was large after major changes in the way app technology worked in October – something researchers call “significant improvements”.
Prior to development, the app had undergone a series of struggles. Initially, the UK chose to build its own system rather than use the more Apple-Google system offered by tech giants, before changing course.
During the launch, it turned out that some older phones could not use the app, and contact contact could sometimes be inaccurate. It also faced opposition due to undue concern over the effectiveness of the tracking system in some way by the police.
Recently, all Test and Trace work – including face-to-face contact, with similar levels of infection to those alerted to the app – has been widely criticized by politicians as having “no clear consequences” despite billions of budgets.
This latest study suggests that the app, taken alone, had a certain impact.
But researchers also warned against putting too much faith in the system.
“Digital tracking is not a place for tracking in practice: both are important,” the paper said.
“It does not replace social isolation or masks: controlling the epidemic requires all means of co-operation in order to work together.”
