It’s human organisation, not tech, which will make test and trace a success

Health Secretary Matt Hancock
10 Downing Street/AFP via Getty

If you have an iPhone, try digging into the settings menu. Buried in the privacy controls you can find a strange heading: “Covid-19 Exposure Logging.” It’s tempting to slide the control switch to the right.

Except there’s a catch. The screen is greyed out. The small print says: “You cannot turn on Exposure Logging without an authorised app.” And of course there isn’t one on offer here. Apple’s promise to use big tech to beat Covid is a mirage.

Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, is the sort of man who would sound hyper-excited even if he was only pulling the top off a tin of baked beans. So when work on a British app using a different system began he didn’t hold back. We’d have it by May, he said. But now it’s the middle of the month and his magic device hasn’t appeared.

Where is it? Clever and committed people have been working flat out for the last three months trying to get an app to do what it should. They now sound as drained as an iPhone battery. The truth is that the app isn’t working properly yet. Maybe it never will.

Julian Glover
Daniel Hambury

They tested it on the Isle of Wight and a lot of people downloaded it. But hopes that it might have made a difference there are based on an optimistic reading of a tiny sample of public health data. Maybe ministers will demand a national app is launched this summer anyway just so they can say they have got one. But it isn’t going to be the way we crush Covid.

California, home of Silicon Valley, isn’t using an app at all. Germany is launching a version only next week

This country was ambitious, aiming for a system which reported useful information back to a central system. There’s a history of Britain trying its own too-clever-by-half way of doing things and then giving up. In the Sixties we built a nuclear bomber, the TSR-2, and then cancelled it as soon as it had performed well on test flights. Later, we came up with the APT tilting train and dropped that. We invented the hovercraft, which once crossed the channel quicker than Eurotunnel, but scrapped it.

Will the British Covid app be added to that sad heap? The talk now is that we may change tack and import simple technology rather than create our own. That setting on your iPhone is the gateway to a joint standard developed by Apple and Google which they hoped would support tracing across the world. But it has technical problems too which is why almost nowhere is using it. It’s not just our app that’s struggling.

Even in the US, only three minor states, Alabama, South Carolina and North Dakota, have built apps that work with the system. California, home of Silicon Valley, isn’t using an app at all. Germany is only launching a version next week after lots of delay and after getting Covid under control through less flashy means too.

Other countries have tried a different standard, but that hasn’t been a success either. France has just launched its own centralised app along the lines we are trying here — but no one knows yet if it works. Singapore got an app out early, using a Bluetooth system, which was later adapted by Australia. But most Singaporeans didn’t download it and Singapore has moved on from its app and is planning to ask people to wear a special digital tracking device instead.

If we scrapped privacy protections and simply exploited the raw data which shows the location of anyone with a phone, crossed-checked with surveillance cameras, we could track the past movements of people who test positive without them even knowing. That’s what they do in South Korea. But this would be an intolerable intrusion into our lives and it still needs a system behind it to get persuade people to isolate.

That’s why, however much we hope technology holds the answer, it all comes back to human organisation and effort. How are we doing on that?

Yesterday the Government gave us some evidence that its test and trace system, which now employs about 23,000 people, is creaking into action. Two thirds of people who tested positive at the start of the month have been asked for details of people they might have infected, and 26,985 of those have been found and contacted.

Whether they then isolate as a result is another matter. Being asked to lock yourself away for a fortnight even if you have no symptoms is tough. But if you get the order, the fact that it’s from someone in a call centre reading a script rather than an app on your phone won’t be the big thing you worry about.