Washington’s COVID-19 exposure notification app to end May 11:
Washington’s COVID-19 exposure notification app is scheduled to conclude May 11 in tandem with the end of the Public Health Emergency.
Sigh.
Admittedly, I have no idea what the backend costs (monetary, time, employee hours, etc.) for this system have been. It’s (theoretically) possible that things have slowed down enough that the cost/benefit ratio has shifted. But it still feels like one more sign that we’ve just…given up.
Since its launch in November 2020, approximately 235,000 participants confirmed a positive test result in WA Notify. This “successful, lifesaving,” app, as the state describes it, has generated more than 2.5 million anonymous exposure notifications, preventing tens of thousands of COVID-19 cases.
Washington was one of the first states to implement exposure notification technology and consistently had one of the lowest COVID-19 death rates in the country, despite also being host to the earliest known domestic case of the virus.
Boy, all of that sure sounds like something you’d want to keep going, doesn’t it?
After May 11, DOH encourages people who test positive for COVID-19 to tell their close contacts that may have been exposed to the virus.
Which I’d expect most (responsible) people have been doing already, but this takes out a key way of letting me know if I’ve been around someone who tested positive but who isn’t a close contact.
Few, if any, places bother checking or requiring vaccines anymore. Masking exists somewhere between “encouraged” (if you’re lucky) and “tolerated”. And now this. Just one more step.
And the worst part is that if we’d handled all of this better over the past few years, I might be able to look on these shifts as positive signs that things were actually improving. But I just don’t have that level of trust in our public health institutions anymore.