Robberies, hit-and-runs, reports of gunshots that turn out to just be a car backfiring: There’s nothing that’ll make you feel quite as paranoid as hate-using crowdsourced crime reporting app Citizen. But now you can add a new useful feature to that: coronavirus close encounters.
On Wednesday, L.A. announced that it’s partnering with Citizen and its SafePass feature to bolster the county’s contact tracing initiative and receive info on an opt-in basis. The voluntary feature uses Bluetooth to anonymously track other app users with whom you may have come in close proximity. If you’ve unknowingly spent an extended amount of time in contact with someone who later tests positive for Covid-19, you’ll receive a notification to get tested and even get a free at-home test sent to you.
Officials from the City and County of Los Angeles as well as Long Beach and Pasadena (both of which have their own health departments) made the joint announcement and explicitly encouraged everyone to download the app (available on both Android and iOS).
According to L.A. County Department of Public Health director Dr. Barbara Ferrer, public health has interviewed—via phone—about 250,000 people who are positive and their close contacts. But they simply need additional capacity, so local public health agencies will begin to receive contact tracing data from the app for users who’ve opted in.
Of course, for any of this to work it’ll need a critical mass of users. According to Citizen founder and CEO Andrew Frame, about 1 million people in the county (which is home to over 10 million) already use Citizen and during a limited beta 3.5% of those opted in to SafePass. Frame also stresses that the app will only share that data with public health officials if you opt in to do so.
If you’ve been tested and want to register those results (either positive or negative) in the app, you’ll need to provide a valid government ID and test results from within the last 30 days. And if you’ve come into contact with someone who’s tested positive, you’ll receive a notification that provides info on the nearest testing site or the option to receive an at-home test (Citizen says it’ll reimburse users for those through November 13).