Germany’s Coronavirus Tracing App Won’t Work
Germany took forever to build an app that will neither offend anybody nor help contain Covid-19. Singapore has the better model.
Let’s call Singapore.
Photographer: Michael Kappeler/picture alliance via Getty Images
Life isn’t about finding perfect solutions but making difficult trade-offs. So it is with the contact-tracing apps that are proliferating faster than I can keep up with. More out of curiosity than optimism, I’ll be downloading my first one on Tuesday: Germany’s newly launched “Corona App.” I hope time proves me wrong, but my hunch is that Germany got several trade-offs wrong, and should have learned from the experience of nimbler countries like Singapore.
The goal, of course, is the same for all these apps: not to replace, but to augment and assist human contact tracers in pinging people who’ve been near an infected person. Human beings can only name contacts they know; software can point out strangers who’ve been within aerosol range.