Make your choice: this is either good news on the evolution of the Covid-19 epidemic, or a questioning of the short-term effectiveness and usefulness of StopCovid.
Because if the government application of contact tracing has been downloaded 1.5 million times since its launch on June 2, it presents for the time being a limited assessment: "a handful" of notifications, according to the Secretary of State digital Cédric O.
"Obviously, in a context where the prevalence of the epidemic is decreasing very quickly, the incentive of people to install the application is limited", recognized this Thursday Cédric O, after the presentation of a report by the National Digital Council on Health Data.
This data can be explained both by a decrease in contamination but also by the technical constraints of this digital monitoring tool.
Already criticized during its conception, StopCovid must allow a user who finds himself contaminated to automatically warn all the people he has encountered within a meter, for more than 15 minutes, during the maximum 14 days of incubation of the virus.
PODCAST. StopCovid: why the coronavirus tracking application arrives so late
Downloaded does not mean activated
The effectiveness of the application depends on the number of people who use it, even if the government considers it useful "from the first downloads", especially in urban areas.
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This report goes through a small notification on smartphones that the patient's device may have come across. Provided that the potentially infected person uses this application as a barrier gesture, which uses the Bluetooth energy-consuming signal continuously.
To work well, especially on the iPhone, the StopCovid app must also be active in the foreground and simply be launched every day as soon as you venture into public places, particularly public transport.
"On this subject of health utility, it is no longer really up to the State Secretariat for Digital Affairs to pilot the deployment of this tool, but rather to the health sphere", further assured Cédric O. The Directorate General of Health, at the forefront in the fight against the epidemic, has in fact taken up the thorny dossier of this application, which could in particular be more useful in the event of a second wave.