> Why do this at this late date? A year ago it would have been useful.
Because it took time to develop, and now they just shipped it?
Maybe if the US had had a functional federal government prior to January then a national exposure notification app might have been developed, rather than relying on the states to do their own thing. Or not. But it's too late now.
I'm not a USAian so I don't know what the take-up of a federal government app would have been. Probably insufficient given what seems to be the ambient level of distrust and misinformation.
I've been running the UK/English NHS tracing app since the start of the second wave here, and I have no complaints. I'm happy with its approach to privacy, and that I've never had an alert from it despite living in a region with high covid incidence has been reassuring.
The US public has (ironically) a long history of being more wary about what their Federal government gets to know about them than the citizens of other nations.
A great example is the lack of any kind of proper federal identification service or registry, something that has been brought up several times over the past century and been met with mass public outcry. So instead we rely on social security numbers, which were literally designed to be bad at identification.
In general the status quo is that the states handle this stuff instead. Whether it be drivers licenses, school circiculums, road maintenance, and emergency responses to natural disasters. Pandemic response is no exception to this. Sure the Federal Goverment often provides funding and guidance but it's largely up to state governments to actually examine and enforce these guidelines.
The point I'm trying to get at here is a federal contact tracing app was never in the cards, regardless of who the President is. The Presidents powers are largely limited to transient international policy (diplomacy, tarrifs, war, border control) and various congress approved Federal agencies.
Because it took time to develop, and now they just shipped it?
Maybe if the US had had a functional federal government prior to January then a national exposure notification app might have been developed, rather than relying on the states to do their own thing. Or not. But it's too late now.
I'm not a USAian so I don't know what the take-up of a federal government app would have been. Probably insufficient given what seems to be the ambient level of distrust and misinformation.
I've been running the UK/English NHS tracing app since the start of the second wave here, and I have no complaints. I'm happy with its approach to privacy, and that I've never had an alert from it despite living in a region with high covid incidence has been reassuring.