Smartphone COVID notifications

November 20, 2021 2:28 PM

A few months ago, I went to Louisiana, and while I was there I got a request to opt in to iPhone COVID exposure notifications, which I did. Now I've gotten my first one, headed "Louisiana Department of Health" -- but I haven't been back there in a long time. Does this mean that (a) I got a notification from any given person and it's just headlined "LA Dept of Health" because that's where I started it, or (b) I passed by a person from Louisiana who later got diagnosed and caused the notification?

Does every state health department even do this? I can't tell.

posted by Countess Elena to Technology (4 answers total)

If you go to Settings > Exposure Notifications do you see more than one "Active Region"? Is Louisiana in the list? The most likely situation is that that you were near somebody recently who tested positive to Covid-19 who has Louisiana as their active region and reported their positive test to Louisiana and you also have Louisiana as your active region, but the two of you were not in Louisiana when you were close to each other.
posted by RichardP at 4:24 PM on November 20, 2021

Details can be found at Google / Apple's Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing site.
posted by RichardP at 4:29 PM on November 20, 2021

I got a notification a couple of weeks ago in New York, and then upon further review the exposure supposedly happened on a day I didn’t even leave the house. None of my neighbors in my building had a positive test that might have triggered this.

So, while it’s a good idea to try to contact trace via phones I don’t think it’s the most reliable system and there are likely a lot of bugs.
posted by Fuego at 5:11 PM on November 20, 2021

Response by poster: RichardP, that must be what happened. I am not too far from LA anyway. I had assumed the app would allow you to match in any given location, though, and I haven't gotten prompted for anywhere else. Like you say, Fuego, I think it's buggy.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:33 PM on November 20, 2021