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Comment by 88840-8855 | Hacker News Reader

Except, the Corona Warn App is the biggest crap that I have ever seen. Yes, the code is open and free and super transparent; morally superior. But what about the effectiveness of this app? Even the German officials do not mention this app since many many many months. The app was criticised from all sides due to lack of effectiveness.

Even the freedom-loving large news outlets published their opinions that they would have wished to see some sacrifice of those high morals for at least SOME level of effectiveness.

I have the app and it is a big piece of junk since day 1. My brother is a doctor and is using this app. He has regular direct contact with Covid patients. Do you know how many "high risk contact" notifications he has received since Summer 2020? Yes, you guessed it: 0.

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The app was recently evaluated for effectiveness.[1] 110-230k people were tested positive as a result of a warning and therefore isolated. They found that it had about the same effect as the tracing efforts by all public health authorities combined.

[1] article in German about it https://www.heise.de/news/RKI-Schaetzung-Warn-App-hat-mehr-a...

These numbers don't seem to reflect the whole picture based on the data provided by the local institutions which show a rather small effectiveness.

See here (german): https://netzpolitik.org/2021/robert-koch-institut-widersprue...

The RKI estimates the contribution that the Corona-Warn-App makes to containment to be roughly as high as that of all health authorities together. [1]

I'm surprised your brother has not received any notifications. My partner is a doctor at a major university hospital and has been warned repeatedly to say the least. During the second wave, the Corona Warn App showed low or high risk warnings pretty much every week.

[1] https://www.heise.de/news/RKI-Schaetzung-Warn-App-hat-mehr-a... (German)

The Corona Warn App won’t give you a warning unless you’ve spent a minimum amount of time next to that person. In Germany, patients often spend only very few minutes near the doctors themselves. That may explain the lack of warnings.

> The app was criticised from all sides due to lack of effectiveness.

That’s because not enough users use it. About 10% of Germans have the app installed.

Massachusetts deciding to auto-install the app on every device is the logical conclusion if you consider those statistics.

That's some seriously flawed logic, and a much bigger issue, if you are correct. They should have tried an information campaign first. If that didn't work then clearly people voted against it, and they have no business going against that. If they think they know better than the people they undermine democracy.

Germany had a massive ad campaign for months without much success. The issue remains that people are lazy. That’s part of why microsoft bundling IE was banned, because 90%+ of users won’t go out of their way to install something.

I can't find those ads, but most likely the ads were uninformative so people did not find them to be instructive. Suggestion without reference to fact is the norm with those campaigns.

These ads were on every single billboard, bus station, etc in the country https://www.dfb.de/fileadmin/_processed_/202007/csm_224709-D...

And the TV ad was shown as preroll ad for youtube videos for months, and on TV during every ad break on every channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4fCbuZqo6M

Just the ad budget for this app dwarfed the budgets of some hollywood blockbusters, and yet it still didn’t reach more than 10% of the population

Me installing a custom rom without google play, and with aurora app store is the logical conclusion.

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