Almost two years after its implementation, the results of the TousAntiCovid application remain mixed.
The application site has published a first activity report for 2020/2021, spotted by The gallerywhich attempts to draw an initial assessment of the effectiveness of the application in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.
46.8 million downloads
The figures put forward by the study relate mainly to the first year of implementation of the TousAntiCovid application, but the authors of the report estimate that the application would have been downloaded on more than 46.8 million unique devices (iPhone and Android) as of November 30, 2021.
The application, originally presented as a contact tracing tool for notifying users who have been in contact with other Covid-positive users, remains marginal in the detection of positive cases: positive cases declared in the application represent only 10% of the total cases identified in France. The authors note, however, that the improvements made to the application since its launch have improved this figure, recalling in passing that “on November 28, 2021, 35% of the total cases reported in France were declared in the application (n= 2309), make it possible to notify 10,316 users as contacts at risk via the Robert protocol (contact tracing via Bluetooth)”.
Figures a little more substantial than those advanced following the launch of the application.
The underused reminder book
The report also considers that another functionality of TousAnticovid is “underused”: that of the “reminder book”, which allows a user to signal his presence in a place open to the public and to receive a notification if a positive person at the Covid visited the place in the same time slot.
The report thus indicates that the notifications made possible by this feature represent “only 15% of total notifications over the period from November 10 to 28, 2021”.
The real functionality that justifies the installation of TousAntiCovid for its users is ultimately that linked to the health pass. The authors rely here on a third-party study carried out among users of the application: respondents place the storage functions of the health pass first, then comes the generation of travel certificates during periods of confinement, news and digits in third position and contact tracing functionalities in fourth position.
A “daily epidemic management tool”
The report nevertheless concludes that the TousAntiCovid application has established itself “as a daily management tool for the epidemic very widely shared by the entire French population”.
If the effectiveness of contact tracing is quite marginal over the first year of use of the application, the authors indicate that the application plays an important role in the contact tracing effort in the face of the Omicron wave, with “nearly 50,000 notifications of risky contacts per day since the end of December”. The functionality could nevertheless be improved, both technically and in terms of user awareness.
This first assessment remains a delicate exercise, according to the authors of the report, who underline the limits of their approach in a section recalling that the data on which they rely remain partial, and are mainly based on a study carried out by the company Kantar Public and about users who have agreed to share telemetry information in the app.