Expensive For Very Little: $ 530 per Report on the COVID Alert app

 The Government Gambled Big Only to Get Little Results

PHOTO COURTOISIE, ISABELLE LAFLAMME

"The COVID Alert app has been downloaded to the phones of 6.5 million Canadians to date."

Launched with greatz noise by the Trudeau and Legault governments, the COVID Alert application has been expensive and has yielded few results.

Ottawa spent as much as $17.5 million to promote the smartphone app through a major advertising campaign and marketing initiatives.

The app has been downloaded by more than 6.5 million Canadians, but it has served very little purpose. Its principle of use is based on the idea that a person with COVID-19 reports anonymously through the application, which then alerts people who have been in close proximity to them.

According to the most recent data, compiled by our Bureau of Investigation, just 4.1% of Canadians who tested positive for COVID used the app to indicate that they had been infected with the disease.

This means that, out of approximately 800,000 Canadians affected by COVID, since the app became available at the end of last summer, only 33,000 have used it, which is a sum of $530 spent per report.

In Quebec, participation was particularly low. The rate was only 1.7%, or 4989 reported cases out of 295,755 total cases.

Marketing

Last October, Premier François Legault urged Quebecers to download the app, touting its easy and safe use.

"If I am capable, many people are capable," he stressed. "If we can reach 50% [of downloads] or more, it's going to have a really transformative impact," Justin Trudeau said at the launch of the app. In fact, this objective has never been achieved. The 6.5 million downloads represent a 20% take-up rate, with an estimated 31.4 million cell phones in Canada.

According to documents tabled in the House of Commons at the end of May, $15.3 million of the $17.5 million spent on advertising and marketing was used for a pan-Canadian campaign orchestrated by cossette.

"Pulled out of the windows"

For social media expert Michelle Blanc, the app's poor success comes as no surprise.

"It's money pulled down the drain," she says. In his opinion, the usefulness of applications on phones to communicate with the population is downright overrated. "People only use a few apps regularly, maybe three or four," she says. She believes that privacy concerns have also curbed reports through the app, even if they are anonymous. "If we made an application for AIDS, would we be ready to say that we have AIDS?" she illustrates to make people's fears understood.

– With Sarah Daoust-Braun

If We Are Positive

Once you test positive for COVID-19, you must obtain a single-use code from your provincial Ministry of Health.

The code must then be entered into the application.

People who have downloaded the app and have been in the vicinity of the infected person in the previous 14 days are alerted.

The application works by exchanging anonymous data using the Bluetooth system.

Note: The application was not active in Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon or Nunavut.