A New Study Worked Out How Many Lives Were Saved By Canada’s COVID Alert App
The app was downloaded 6.6 million times between July 2020 and July 2021.
If you're one of the Canadians who downloaded the country's official COVID Alert app, you might be wondering how much of an effect it had on the country's pandemic response.
Thankfully, a team of researchers at McGill University sat down to try and figure that answer out, coming up with an estimate of how many lives were saved by the app.
The app uses Bluetooth to keep track of nearby phones and lets users know if they've been exposed to COVID-19. It was introduced in July 2020 and widely advertised by Justin Trudeau and the Canadian government, and was downloaded 6.6 million times between July 31, 2020, and July 15, 2021.
By working with the number of notifications, the chance of someone passing on COVID-19 and the effectiveness of quarantine (and by calculating what would happen if no notification was sent), researchers determined how many cases had been avoided — and, further, how many deaths had been stopped as well.
The study estimates that between 6,284 and 10,894 cases of COVID-19 were prevented due to the app's effectiveness at alerting people that they needed to quarantine due to exposure to the virus.
Because of those prevented cases, researchers say the lives of somewhere between 57 and 101 people were saved thanks to the app.
"Though nationwide app usage rates were low during the period of assessment, provinces in which there was widespread adoption of the app – notably, Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia - showed dramatically higher ratios of averted cases and averted deaths," researchers concluded. "This finding strongly suggests that the COVID Alert app, when adopted at sufficient levels, can be an effective tool for curtailing a pandemic like COVID-19."