State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Will Virginia Lead the U.S. to Adopt Smart Tracing Apps?

Governing: Technology was supposed to help government health departments with the heavy lift in tracking and tracing the spread of the coronavirus. After all, with billions of smartphones in use around the globe, adding another app that would alert users when they were in the proximity of a person or people who were COVID-positive seemed like a no-brainer.

But as Governing's Senior Staff Writer Alan Greenblatt explained, it never worked that way. Most states showed little interest in using the app developed to run on Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS operating systems. Instead, states opted to build their own, which meant interoperability became a problem, making it tougher to share information across state lines.

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