Japanese Corona App Did Not Warn for Four Months

In Japan, it appears that an error in the local corona app prevented some Android users from receiving a notification when they came into contact with infected people.

 

The COCOA (Contact-Confirming Application) app was rolled out this summer. But since September, one in three users with an Android device no longer receive notifications when they had been in contact with an infected person.

The error has since been corrected, but it took until this week before the Japanese health minister admitted that the app had been broken for four months, Nikkei Asia writes.

The Japanese business newspaper is critical. Japan saw the number of infections increase sharply this autumn and Nikkei says that informing more people in time would probably have helped more than closing cafes and restaurants.

The minister himself says that relatively few complaints have been received about the app not functioning. But the question is how many people downloaded the application and then deleted it because it gave no info.

COCOA has been downloaded about 7.7 million times on Android. That is relatively little compared to the 126 million inhabitants in Japan.