Ontario plans to double the number of contact tracers it employs, roll out a voluntary Bluetooth-powered COVID-19 tracing app and finally do away with public health units manually entering fax printouts into its database as part of a plan to enhance contact tracing and case management as the province reopens.
Speaking on background, Ministry of Health officials said Thursday that the smartphone app will be ready for download in Ontario only on July 2.
It shares randomly generated codes via Bluetooth between phones that come into close proximity of one another.
If a user later tests positive, the smartphone app will anonymously send a message encouraging everyone who shared a code with that user in the previous 14 days to get tested.
Officials say the system protects users’ privacy by not collecting identifiable data or location data, and deletes all other information is gathers after two weeks.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford urged everyone to get the app when it's made available.
"If we don’t have the cooperation of the people of Ontario – we put ourselves more at risk – it’s 100 per cent private," he said. "We need people to download this app – it’s going to protect us, it’s going to protect our families."
The source code for the app was built by Shopify and dubbed “COVID Shield”, and it was customized for the province by the Ontario Digital Service, who said Thursday it would be released under a new name on July 2.
Officials said they hope with a major marketing campaign, they can get 50 per cent of Ontario residents to download the app.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday that the app will be rolled out in other provinces after it gets underway in Ontario.
The app is entirely voluntary and users can delete it completely at any time. Blackberry conducted a security audit of the app and said they approved of it.
Officials describe the app as a “supplement” to all other existing efforts on tracing. Already 97 per cent of cases are contacted within 24 hours.
The province also expects future cases of COVID-19 to involve more close contacts than ones in the past, as the reopening of the economy means each infected person will have been out in their community and workplace more often than in the past.
So they’re doubling the number of people working to contact trace in the province, to close to 4,000 people.
Approximately 1,700 of the new tracers are from Statistics Canada, while several hundred more will come from various parts of the Ontario public service.
Echoing advice from Peel’s chief medical officer earlier in the week, Ontarians are now being asked to keep track of their close contacts themselves and be prepare to offer names, dates and phone numbers of their contacts should they require a COVID-19 test.
The province is also spending $20 million over the next four years to replace its dreaded Integrated Public Health Information Management System (iPHIS) with a new system that will combine all COVID-19 data together – including from public health units such as Toronto or Middlesex-London that got so fed up with iPHIS they built their own systems.
One of the key problems in Ontario’s current testing and tracing strategy is that the labs that conduct COVID-19 tests fax in “batches” the positive tests they complete to public health units across the province.
Those batches of fax results then had to be manually entered into the iPHIS system before contact tracing could begin.
"We are finally getting on with the long overdue work of replacing systems that no longer meet the needs of the province’s public health units," Health Minister Christine Elliott said.
With the new system, to be fully operational by the end of August, no more faxes will be required, and all contact tracers throughout the province will be able to wirelessly access all the information they need.
