Quebec turns down notification app
Quebec has declined to take advantage of the federal Covid notification app – unless things get bad.
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Dhomas 15:43 on 2020-08-25 Permalink
When is the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago. When is the second best time? Right now. The Quebec government has the opportunity to deploy the app before things get bad but they’re going to wait, for what exactly? “It doesn’t protect the most vulnerable”: those who can’t afford (recent) smartphones. That will not change if they deploy it later. It just makes no sense. I don’t understand why they don’t just do it now.
I never thought I’d agree with Doug Ford, but he’s right: “Just do it. It protects everyone. It’s not a big deal.”
Derek 16:14 on 2020-08-25 Permalink
My read on this is that Quebec is buying time to build their own app. Why use something that’s already available when you can build your own?
dwgs 16:23 on 2020-08-25 Permalink
*insert gif of person slamming head against desk on infinite loop*
Kate 16:36 on 2020-08-25 Permalink
Here’s Blork’s thoughts on this again from a couple of weeks ago.
Ian 18:54 on 2020-08-25 Permalink
Really this can’t come as a surprise to anyone. This is the way Quebec asserts its national identity, and it has been thus for many decades.
dmdiem 19:33 on 2020-08-25 Permalink
I saw Star Trek when I was a kid and thought, “Yes. This is the future I want. Where everyone put aside their petty differences to explore this wonder filled universe in the spirit of peace and cooperation.”
Now it dawns on me why there were no Quebecers on the Enterprise… they’re all back on earth trying to build their own god damn Starfleet.
Sigh… enjoy the universe, everyone else.
mare 20:03 on 2020-08-25 Permalink
In order for this app to be useful it needs to be used by >70% of the people. If it is promoted now, it might slowly gain traction.
On the other hand, almost all Quebeckers really trust authoity, so if the Quebec government says that everyone should install this tomorrow, everyone will.
I was kind of surprised when wearing a mask went from ‘recommended’ to ‘required’ and suddenly everyone was masked in the grocery store, while beforehand 50% of the shoppers were mask-less.
JoeNotCharles 00:00 on 2020-08-26 Permalink
I installed the app myself to find out why it won’t work in Quebec, and it turns out to be not as bad as it sounds:
Canada’s “COVID Alert” app is just a minor modification to the open source “COVID Shield” (https://www.covidshield.app) which says:
COVID Shield is not currently available for download or use.
COVID Shield is provided as a reference for your local public health authority to build their own app. If you are interested in using COVID Shield, please contact your local government representative and ask what they are doing about exposure notification for COVID-19.
So all Quebec needs to do to “make its own app” is replace the “Canada” splash screen with one that says “Quebec” and swap the order of the “English” and “French” buttons. (Or remove “English” altogether.) Alberta has its own app too, which is exactly that – it looks the same as the Canada one, but with an “Alberta” splash screen, no language selector (it’s probably English only but in theory it could just be based on your phone’s language setting) and has an extra “Privacy Policy” screen you have to accept.
I believe that even if Quebec publishes their own app there’ll be nothing stopping people in Quebec from using the national COVID Alert app instead. It all uses the same backend.
The thing that’s missing right now is that when Quebec health authorities notify someone they have COVID, there’s no way to enter that data into the app. So you can install the app right now, and it will keep a list of all the phones with the app you’ve gone near, but if any of those phone’s owners are diagnosed, you won’t actually be notified. The patient needs to get a code to enter into the app to register that they have a diagnosis (this prevents people from causing a panic by clicking “I have COVID!” and causing fake notifications). Literally the only thing missing to use the app here is that health authorities need to give out those codes when they make a diagnosis.
JoeNotCharles 00:04 on 2020-08-26 Permalink
Hah, I see a bunch of people posted the same thing about how the app works in the earlier thread. And I thought I was providing a service.
One thing from the earlier thread, someone said: “Apparently neither Apple nor Google will allow more than one app per country for contact tracing so there isn’t much of an option for Quebec to make its own, it is either use the Canadian one or nothing.”
That can’t be true, since there’s a Canada app and an Alberta app already.
Dhomas 06:19 on 2020-08-26 Permalink
@JoeNotCharles the Alberta app has been replaced by the Federal government app:
https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/mobile/alberta-abandons-covid-19-tracking-app-in-favour-of-federal-app-1.5057373
Also, I’m not sure it was using the same Google/Apple developed tracing system since it needed to be in the foreground to work and appeared to be a battery hog.