By Bronwyn Howell

New Zealand has attracted much international interest during the COVID-19 pandemic for the apparent success of its virus-elimination strategy, keeping infection and death rates low. However, this has come at the cost of the world’s most stringent lockdowns when community infections are detected, along with draconian border policies — even for New Zealand citizens.  

Unfortunately,
the delta variant has proven too difficult for New Zealand’s much-lauded
elimination strategy to mitigate. A single
case detected in Auckland in August has mushroomed into widespread community-based
infections. New cases continue to increase, mostly in Auckland, but are
spreading  to adjacent regions with the
current daily nationwide average approaching 200. Elimination
has been abandoned in favor of containment, as observed in almost all other
countries. When all health districts nationwide reach a 90 percent full
vaccination rate of the eligible population over 16 years old, the country will
transition from its existing lockdown system to a new “traffic
light” system. This system is based on expected demands for local health care
resources given the extent of community transmission in each relevant area.

At
all traffic light colors (green, orange, and red), the restrictions on
vaccinated individuals are far less onerous than those facing unvaccinated
individuals. Key to moving to the new system is the availability of vaccination
certificates (due late November). However, regardless of the traffic light
color, it will be mandatory for all businesses and individuals to keep records
of their activities using either the NZ
COVID Tracer (NZCT) smartphone app or other systems (e.g., paper records). This
continues a mandate from COVID-19
Response Minister Chris Hipkins (which became active on September 7) that
obligates premises operators and function hosts to ensure individuals comply
with the requirement to scan or share other personal information facilitating
contact-tracing activities should their premises be identified as a possible
site of infection transmission.

NZCT
differs from most other smartphone contact-tracing apps (e.g., Apple and Google’s Bluetooth app) because it requires users
to scan QR codes when entering premises or public transport vehicles. Scanning
is an onerous but visible activity, enabling verification that the activity has
occurred. However, monitoring and enforcement is costly, so it relies mostly on
individual self-motivation or peer pressure for scanning to take place. The
most interesting feature of NZCT use when it was voluntary was the extent to
which scanning
was not
being done
by registered app users. To that end, it is interesting to observe how app usage has
changed
following the instruction mandating its use.

While
over 3.3 million apps have been downloaded (approximately 66 percent of the
population), on any given day before Hipkins’ September 7 mandate, on average
fewer than 20 percent of the registered applications recorded a scan, although
this increased when local infections were notified in August 2020 and February
2021 (Figure 1). The number of active devices on a given day increased
immediately following the mandate, but still only around 35 percent of apps were
observed to be scanning. This was lower than the peak in August 2020 when 50
percent of apps were active. The mandate has increased the number of app users
taking scans, but many app users are still not scanning daily.

By
contrast, the proportion of apps activating an optional Bluetooth feature has
not fluctuated with infection outbreaks. This rose from 50 percent of
registered apps to 68 percent, but the increase appears to coincide with local
outbreaks (August 18, when risk of infection increased), not the September 7
application use mandate.

Scanning
activity has certainly increased following the mandate — from 500,000 scans per
day in early August to 2.5 million (but falling) in September (Figure 2). This
appears to be triggered by the mandate and not increased infection risk;
there was negligible increase when the August outbreak was identified.

However,
Figure 3 shows that the average number of scans per active app has not
increased much following the mandate. Most of the additional scanning activity
has come from inactive users becoming active. For the most part, active users
scanned just under two codes per day on average (with negligible change despite
local viral spread until the August 2021 outbreak, during which the most
stringent lockdown curtailed most activity). Following the mandate, just 2.2
scans per active device were recorded. This suggests that even the most
enthusiastic scanners don’t scan very much, and the mandate has not altered
that.

It
remains to be seen whether even these low levels of activity can be maintained
as the traffic light system becomes embedded. However, as active devices and
scan numbers are falling (albeit slower than before), it seems that despite
Hipkins’ mandate, the high costs of scanning, monitoring, and enforcement will
remain significant limits to the usage and ultimate success of NZCT.

The post Compulsory COVID-19 contact-tracing apps: More evidence from New Zealand appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.