A work in progress

It’s “a work in progress.” This is Interior Secretary Eduardo Año’s description of contact-tracing app StaySafe.PH, which all local government units (LGUs) have been ordered to use for pandemic response.

I have the StaySafe app on my cell phone. Sometimes it works; more often it’s so clunky to get going, whether there’s free WiFi in the area or using cellular data.

It’s such an absolute hassle to use that I have sworn never to return to certain establishments that didn’t give me the option to just fill out manual contact tracing forms when it took an interminably long time to make the StaySafe app work.

The first time I got the app to work, in a mall where I’m a regular at the supermarket, what immediately struck me was how easy it would be for anyone to lie about one’s health status or possible COVID symptoms, no matter how often the data is updated.

Obviously, this completely defeats the purpose of COVID contact tracing. On the other hand, do people also put accurate information in those manual contact tracing forms? There have been reports of people writing the names of cartoon characters or movie stars, with no one bothering to check the accuracy of what’s written before the small pieces of paper are dropped into boxes.

Even if guards check what’s written, how can they verify if the information provided is accurate? So they don’t bother checking.

These are only some of the problems we face in carrying out one of the most critical components of pandemic response.

It seems personal contact tracing is the only thing that can truly work in our country where COVID-positive people fake negative test results just so they can visit Boracay in the middle of a deadly surge.

Even in this aspect, however, authorities have raised the problem of an acute lack of manpower to cover the population even just within the National Capital Region and the provinces of Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna and Rizal or NCR Plus.

Someone I know who got COVID said that after testing positive in an RT-PCR swab test and undergoing home isolation, he received one call presumably from a contact tracer, who had only one question: was he an overseas Filipino worker? When he said no, that was the end of the call. He never got another call for contact tracing throughout his 14-day home quarantine.

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Last year at the start of the pandemic, people I know living in Taiwan told me that they had activated an impressively accurate and efficient digital contact tracing system. Its development arose from a need after Taiwan suffered from the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. With 668 suspected cases and 181 deaths, it was one of the worst SARS tolls in the world. But Taiwan learned its lessons well.

With the outbreak of COVID in China’s Wuhan City, anyone arriving in Taiwan from overseas who didn’t have the contact tracing app was required to either download it or, in the case of visitors, lease a phone for the duration of their stay where activation of the app is a requirement.

The Taiwanese have the COVID contact tracing equivalent of the electronic ankle bracelet that felons in the US under house arrest must use. This allows Taiwanese authorities to catch anyone breaking quarantine. Those caught face stiff fines.

I don’t know if StaySafe is envisioned to work this way. In many areas, it’s not working, plain and simple.

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The Department of the Interior and Local Government has ordered LGUs to either adopt the StaySafe app, which is the digital contact tracing system of the national government, or else integrate it with their existing local apps, so that there can be at least one digital app that can be used anywhere in the country. The DILG has said real-time data from the Department of Health on active COVID cases will be integrated into the StaySafe app.

To encourage the use of StaySafe, the DILG is also endorsing a Safety Seal Certification Program for commercial establishments that use the app.

Año said recently that there are now 1.6 million StaySafe users that have generated codes; 9.3 million for QR scanning, and 3.2 million users for mobile app and web.

But Eliseo Rio, who was eased out last year as undersecretary of the Department of Information and Communications Technology after he criticized StaySafe, said the app fails in contact tracing.

Here’s what Rio had to say about the app developed by Multisys Technologies Corp.: “It just generates a database of cell phone numbers with their location, useful for surveillance purposes of people who reported themselves with symptoms, but of little value to people who report themselves as healthy.”

Multisys founder and CEO David
Almirol Jr. of course defends the app. Last year he was one of The Outstanding Young Men awardees.

And a unified contact tracing app does make sense. Especially after we practically laid out the welcome mat for the entry this year of every type of infectious, lethal COVID variant and mutant from all over the world. We might yet temporarily close our doors to travelers from India – once all the imaginable COVID variants in that country are here.

Our policy of (non)containment of the coronavirus so far has been, “Give me your tired, your poor, your infected masses yearning to breathe out freely their viruses…” So here we are, with a daily average of 8,770 COVID cases in the past week and crematoriums full.

The way things are going, however, it looks like StaySafe will become fully, efficiently operational in time only for the next pandemic.

At this point, first they have to make the darn app work.

Unfortunately, amid this worst COVID surge since the start of the pandemic, StaySafe, as the DILG chief himself has described it, is still a work in progress.