The federal government has been touting its COVID Alert app since early on in the pandemic.
It's the software that can be installed on smartphones that were produced within the last five years or so, and using bluetooth technology, it determines if you've been exposed to someone who has been diagnosed with COVID-19.
Of course, that person would have had to report their diagnosis through the app in order for it to work as it's intended.
According to numbers from the federal government, just over 6 million people in our country have downloaded the app, and just over 15,600 diagnoses have been reported.
NEWSTALK 1010 Science Expert Dan Riskin says that means roughly 0.25 per cent of people with the app have reported a case of COVID-19, which is way lower than what you'd expect to see.
"You would expect that about 1.8 per cent of them would have gotten COVID-19 and would have reported it," Riskin says. "But in fact the number of people that have reported that they had COVID-19 is only 13 per cent as high as it should be."
Riskin says it's not easy to tell what's going wrong - why more people aren't using the app, and why more diagnoses aren't being reported.
"There is an alternative possibility which is the people who downloaded the app are not a random sample of Canadians, and that they just happen to be a group of people who are far less likely to become sick with COVID-19 than the general population," Riskin says.
So looking at these numbers, is the app making an impact?
"It's not making an impact of the size one would hope," Riskin says. "But any time something like this is tried, it's information to help for next time, and one thing about this pandemic that people need to remember is that this is COVID-19 but that doesn't protect us from the next COVID-20 or COVID-25, this could happen any year."
"Part of this is building an infrastructure to protect us from the next pandemic, so even if it doesn't help with COVID-19 the way we'd hoped, we will learn from this experience in a way that hopefully will help us next time.
Riskin adds, he's bummed that the app isn't having a bigger impact, but if it has saved even one life, it's worth it.