Has the official Corona warning app managed to help in the fight against the pandemic since it was launched 100 days ago?
For months, the federal government has been asking: "Support us in the fight against Corona." With the help of the official German Corona warning app, chains of infection are to be broken as quickly as possible. For this purpose, it is anonymously checked whether a user has been in the immediate vicinity of an infected person for a long time. Recently, however, there have been more and more new infections in many places.
Federal Minister of Health Jens Spahn (40) had to point this out around September 19ththat with almost 2,300 new infections within one day, a new high was reported since April. In some cases, experts do not believe that the app actually warns against contacts effectively.
Not enough downloads at the moment?
"So that the Corona warning app really brings something, the number of downloads should double," warned the economist Gert Wagner, member of the Advisory Council for Consumer Questions, in an interview with "Welt am Sonntag" at the end of August. At that point, the app had been downloaded more than 17 million times. In the event of contact between an infected person and another person, “the probability that both people will have the app is six percent,” the economist explained at the time. Even with a doubling and provided that all those affected also report via the app, no more than 25 percent of the infections could be identified.
Since then, however, relatively few users have been added. At first it looked like the Corona warning app could become a real long-term download hit, but the numbers flattened out. The Corona warning app has been downloaded 18.4 million times to date on iPhones and Android smartphones (as of September 22nd). According to Wagner, it should be at least 34 million users for the program to be effective. According to the "Statista" portal, there were around 58 million smartphone users in Germany at the end of 2019. According to this, almost 60 percent of all Germans with smartphones would have to use the app.
So far, its use is voluntary
Veronika Grimm, member of the Advisory Council for the Assessment of Overall Economic Development, explained to the "WamS" that contact tracking through an application only promises success if 80 percent of the population also used the app. "We cannot get there with a voluntary solution," she says. From a purely mathematical point of view, this seems downright utopian. According to the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), 83.2 million people lived in Germany in 2019. So more than 66.5 million citizens would have to own a smartphone – and every single one of them would have to use the program. So far, using the app and reporting an infection has been voluntary.
With more than 83 million people in Germany and more than 274,000 confirmed cases (as of September 22), of which around 243,700 are considered recovered, a total of 4,373 teleTANs have been issued since June 16, 2020 according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), to verify a positive test result. However, this does not mean that such a result was actually reported in the app and corresponding contacts could be informed.
Error in the app
In addition, a few weeks after the app was launched, it became known that the contact check on many iPhones was only incomplete. This emerged from research by "tagesschau.de". Users were therefore sometimes not informed for several weeks whether they were in contact with an infected person. The "Bild" had previously drawn attention to similar problems with Android smartphones. At the end of July, however, the corresponding bugs were fixed with an update on both platforms.
Still a success story?
The German corona warning app was officially presented by the federal government for the first time on June 16. At the time, Spahn described the application as an "important tool in containing the virus". The German app is "by far the most successful corona warning app in Europe," he now took stock. It has become "an integral part of everyday pandemic life in Germany". The more than 18 million downloads are roughly the same as in all other EU countries combined.
"In the meantime, more than 1.2 million test results have been transmitted via the connected laboratories and almost 5,000 users have warned their contacts via the app," explained Spahn. "That shows: the Corona warning app is working." At the same time, the app is not a "panacea". But Spahn again emphasized that the application is an "important tool".