On August 3, 2020, the Government of Spain presented the Radar COVID application as a bet to control and track positive cases of covid-19 through the (voluntary) involvement and responsibility of society itself. If positive, citizens could anonymously include the information regarding their contagion and create an alert system for other users. The initiative was similar to others already existing – and successful – in the international arena.
However, Radar COVID reaches its first anniversary with more shadows than lights. For the data … and the sensations. Just as it never had the complicity of the scientific and academic community, the social detachment towards this tool is also manifest. Its entry on the wrong foot – criticized for the lack of participation and transparency in its creation, uneven implantation in the autonomous communities and with reluctance … – may explain its poor subsequent performance.
“The idea was good, but the results have not been. More important than the usefulness of the app was the Administration’s ability to lead, convince and give credibility to the initiative. I think that all this has been lacking, ”says Ángel Gil, professor of Preventive Medicine and public health expert, for MUY. From the Spanish Society for Health Informatics (SEIS), its president Luciano Sáez recalls that “for a project to be successful it is vital to have those responsible for ICT [information and communication technologies] from the organizations involved.”
According to data provided by the Secretary of State for Digitization (Sedia) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Technological Transformation, Radar COVID celebrates its first anniversary with nearly 7.6 million downloads. This means that around 18% of the population has the app installed on their mobile device.
They are numbers below the objectives set. The Executive himself marked a minimum of 20% so that the tracking could be “effective.” Since February, the growth is practically residual. Already in December, when the application added 5.5 million downloads, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, acknowledged that “they were not enough.” And all this despite the investment in advertising has exceeded 3.5 million euros.
Even more bleak are the figures regarding its use. Those infected by covid-19 can receive a code from the health authorities to dump their information anonymously. The autonomous communities have requested more than 1,100,000 codes to deliver to the infected population. However, only 2% of users completed this process (69,000 codes entered into the system). In some regions, the percentage is directly 0% . Added to this are negative experiences of use: excess battery consumption, periodic failures, availability only on certain operating systems, and so on.
Therefore, it is difficult to find advocates for Radar COVID beyond the parties involved. Sedia emphasizes that “it has contributed to complement the detection of close contacts and new positive cases through digital tracking.”
With this present, does Radar COVID have a future? “As long as we continue to have community transmission, without a doubt it will continue to be a vital tool,” they point out in Sedia. The objective is to expand functionalities and solve errors. In addition, on Radar COVID and its managers, two sanctioning processes of the Spanish Agency for Data Protection are open for “rational indications of a possible violation” of the regulations in this field.
