Health Minister Mark Butler said the “failed app” cost taxpayers more than $10 million to develop, a further $7 million in advertising, $2.1 million in maintenance and 2 million dollars in personnel costs.
“This failed application was a colossal waste of more than $21 million of taxpayer money,” Butler said.
“It was the contact tracers working on the ground that were the real success story, not this failed app.”
The app has found 17 nearby contacts
The spread of the delta variant last year forced health authorities to abandon previous efforts to identify every individual infected with the virus, raising questions about the app’s usefulness.
Even before the delta spread, state and territory governments, including NSW, Queensland and the ACT, had stopped using the app or had never accessed it.
A study by public health experts from UNSW and the University of Queensland found that the app had identified just 17 additional close contacts that were not traced through contact tracing by NSW Health between May and November 2020 .
Of the 619 positive cases of COVID-19 recorded in NSW during that time, only 22% were using the app, and the app only detected 15% of actual close contacts traced by the state’s contact tracers.
“In our study, COVIDSafe did not make a significant contribution to the COVID response in NSW during 2020. Instead, the application created a large workload without any clear benefit,” the researchers concluded.
Former Social Services Minister Anne Ruston James Brickwood
Former social services minister Anne Ruston defended the app “had served a purpose”.
“Although [17] it may seem like a small number, which could have had a very significant impact on the health outcomes or the economic outcomes of our country,” he told a Senate committee about the number of cases he had identified.
The Labour-led committee recommended the Morrison government stop any further spending on enforcement.
The COVIDSafe app uses bluetooth technology to identify contacts who also have the app and then filters out all exposures other than those who have been within 1.5 meters of an infected person for a specified period of time. This contact data was made available to contact tracers.
Clarification: An earlier version said the COVIDSafe app had cost $9 million. After the government provided more information, the figure was updated to $21 million.