Japan to call time on troubled contact tracing app COCOA

After over two years and more than 40 million downloads Japan’s troubled COVID-19 contact tracing application COCOA could be about to send out its final notifications. 

Japan’s Digital Minister Taro Kono is reported by Japanese media to have announced during a press conference on Tuesday plans to suspend the COVID-19 Contact Confirming Application (COCOA) due to the change in circumstances into which it had originally been released. 

Suspension of COCOA will come after carrying out a survey about the application, according to reports. 

As of September 9, 2022 COCOA had been subject to around 40.5 million downloads, according to health ministry data. The number of positive COVID-19 cases reported through the contact tracing app stood at nearly 3.5 million.

"Many people have made use of the app and it has been effective in encouraging people to change their behavior," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told reporters during a press conference on Tuesday. 

"However, after reviewing the reporting criteria (for virus cases), with the scope being limited to only those people considered to be higher risk, including the elderly, the efficacy of the app will be limited so its suspension is under consideration," he said. 

Since its release in June 2020, the government has spent around 1.3 billion yen on the app, according to the chief cabinet secretary.

It was only in April that Japan’s Digital Agency announced the allocation of a budget of around 500 million yen for COCOA during FY2022.  

While the number of downloads at that time (around 35 million) is in keeping with the relatively even pace of increase in downloads over the last year, the number of positive cases reported through the app tells a different story - around 765,000 in early April compared to the nearly 3.5 million by early September.  

As of September 1, 2022, 18,917,782 people had been diagnosed with COVID-19 in Japan, accounting for 15 percent of the population, according to government data. 

The increase of well over 300 percent in COVID-19 cases reported through COCOA was no doubt driven by a seventh wave of virus infections in Japan which saw the country report record highs of over 260,000 new daily cases.

After having downloaded COCOA within around a week of its June 19, 2020 release it wasn’t until this summer, in the midst of the seventh wave, that this app user was pinged with their first notification of a “close contact.” 

Such was the lack of activity being generated by the app to that point, I’d all but forgotten it was still installed on my phone. 

Upon receiving that first notification, perhaps I was faced with the dilemma that many other COCOA users have been confronting in recent months, namely, what to do with the information? To what extent does it need to dictate the course of one’s daily life?  

Recommendations that accompanied the notification at that time were largely limited to considering getting a medical examination in the event of showing symptoms or before entering situations in which the risk of infection and its spread was high.

The relevant people at work were informed while I stayed home for a few days and wondered whether or not it might be time to delete COCOA or face this situation over and over again. At the time of informing others in my circle I could feel a quiet and tired sigh from some - a reaction perhaps to the fact that I still had this thing installed and active.  

Had COCOA become more trouble than it was worth? A month or two on from then, and “yes,” seems to be the mood of the decision makers in Japan, although there appears to be no schedule as yet for the suspension of the app. 

COCOA was developed by (although largely outsourced) the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare at an initial cost of around 390 million yen.  

The app uses a short-range communication function (Bluetooth) on smartphones to receive notifications about the possibility of contact with another app user who has tested positive.

Users register positive test results by entering into COCOA a processing number assigned to them by health authorities at the time of testing.

Within a few days of its release COCOA had received nearly four million downloads before the ministry temporarily shut it down in order to address issues that included acceptance of processing numbers not issued by health authorities.

More trouble was to follow the app. In February 2021 developers completed an update of COCOA to address a bug which had prevented the app from sending notifications to Android users since the end of September 2020.  

The reported announcement of plans to suspend COCOA comes as authorities in Japan look to move the country into a new phase of living with the novel coronavirus. This includes shortening the period of isolation for COVID-19 patients, easing border restrictions for overseas visitors, and making changes to the extent to which new virus cases are reported.

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