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Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google on Tuesday announced what they hope will be a big step in helping regional public health officials contain COVID-19.
A new iPhone software update, called Exposure Notifications Express, will make it easier to opt into Apple’s COVID-19 contact-tracing technology, so that all iPhone owners can turn on exposure notifications without downloading a third-party app. The update was announced in a briefing with reporters Tuesday morning.
“Exposure Notifications Express provides another option for public health authorities to supplement their existing contact tracing operations with technology without compromising on the project’s core tenets of user privacy and security,” Apple AAPL, +2.65% and Google GOOGL, +0.68% GOOG, +0.79% said in a statement.
The technology will be immediately available for iPhone users; Android owners will have access later this month.
Apple’s contact-tracing technology, developed with Google, relies on Bluetooth smartphones technology to notify people when they come into close contact with a person who’s tested positive for COVID-19. Until now, however, iPhone users could only turn on the exposure notifications if they also had a contact tracing app developed by a public health authority. Apple and Google have said they won’t retain any health data.
The iOS 13.7 update could help COVID-19 contact tracing technology get more people to opt in. So far, only six states — Alabama, Arizona, Nevada, North Dakota, Virginia, and Wyoming — have adopted the Apple-Google system, initially announced in May. In all, 25 states and the District of Columbia representing 55% of the U.S. population are considering its use, according to Apple.
Some public health authorities have held off from joining because they did not have a team in place to ramp up the technology, an Apple representative said in response to a question during the 30-minute Webex briefing.
Contact tracing is considered a key deterrent in the spread of COVID-19, which so far has claimed more than 180,000 lives and accounted for 6 million cases in the U.S.
“Innovative technologies like EN Express will help enhance the capacity of the public to know their exposure to COVID-19 and aid public health practitioners to be more effective in their efforts to contain this and other infectious diseases,” Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said in a statement.
