CHARLOTTE, N.C. — State health officials are urging North Carolinians to download the "SlowCOVIDNC" app, saying it’s more important now than ever to get people on board.
The app uses Bluetooth technology to notify users if they've been in the vicinity of someone who’s tested positive.
Since the start of the pandemic, state and county leaders have mostly relied on phone-tree style contact tracing to slow the spread, by calling people who receive a positive result to figure out where they’ve been and with who, then notifying who they can of the potential exposure.
As the WCNC Charlotte Defenders have reported, a litany of issues have stalled the process. From county leaders frustrated by the lack of responsiveness to community members who said they were either never notified, or contacted too late.
“One of the things about contact tracing, that process can take days or weeks," Sam Gibbs, DHHS' Deputy Secretary for Technology and Operations, said.
Gibbs helped launch the "SlowCovidNC" app.
If someone uploads their positive test result to the app, Bluetooth technology will backtrack that person’s movements, and notify other app users who were recently within six feet of the infected user’s phone signal.
“Then we've got a pre-programmed message that pops up says, you've potentially been exposed to COVID, here's your testing site, here's contact tracing, here's what you need to do," Gibbs said. “So it greatly reduces that amount of time for people to find out that they've been exposed to COVID.”
And Gibbs said it’s able to notify more people than they ever could using old school contact tracing.
“If you're in the grocery store and you're in line for 15 or 20 minutes, now you would potentially know if you've gotten exposed to someone who was in the line," he explained.
DHHS started beta testing the app on college campuses over the summer.
Now seeing its success, they’re encouraging everyone statewide to download it.
“It's very important now more than ever," Gibbs said. "Especially since the UK variant has entered the state, it's going to spread much more rapidly.”
As of Monday, "SlowCOVIDNC" had been downloaded more than 664,313 times. DHHS said 741 individuals have notified others of their positive test result using the app, resulting in a total of 1,934 exposure notifications.
Gibbs hopes they can get even more people on board while understanding why some may be hesitant.
"The difficulty has been anytime you have the government, if you will, wanting to have some information that it's collecting on you, people are rightfully so a little cautious about that," Gibbs said.
But he emphasized that privacy is paramount. The app doesn’t use your personal information, but rather an assigned pin.
Users will never see another user’s name or location.
"Apple and Google took extra steps to make sure that your privacy was secured," Gibbs explained. "Then within the department of health and human services, our privacy and security folks vetted this thoroughly, also our state chief information officer as well. So it is completely safe.”
The app is free on iPhone and Android, and the only permission users need to grant it is Bluetooth access.
“Now as we have vaccines starting to be dispensed, that's going to take some time, and we're not out of the woods yet," Gibbs said. "So right now, this tool is very, very important.”