Dutch contact tracing app only made a “small contribution” against COVID, study claims

By Ronan Fahy, Jill Toh, and Naomi Appelman

In June 2021, a major study was published on the government’s contact-tracing app in the Netherlands (CoronaMelder app). Entitled CoronaMelder: modelstudie naar effectiviteit, it concluded that the app only made a “small contribution to the fight against the coronavirus.” 

Between December 2020 and March 2021, 7,514 people tested positive after a message from the CoronaMelder app, and according to the study this “prevented an estimated 15,000 infections”, out of around 1.8 million infections in the same period.

Also, the app was downloaded 4.6 million times, but was only used by 16% of the population in the Netherlands.

On 8 June 2021, the Minister for Health sent a Letter to Parliament, seeking to extend the legislation allowing for the use of the CoronaMelder app until October 2021.

On 28 April 2021, the Minister for Health informed the Parliament that the CoronaMelder notification had been paused for two days, due to a data breach caused by Google software. Google was said to have closed the leak in the so-called Google-Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) framework, which was adopted for the app.

The data leak was reported to the Dutch Data Protection Authority.