The US government will pull the plug on the servers powering the nation’s Covid notifications on May 11. States aren’t rushing to boot up replacements.
that will stop working when the servers go offline next month.
States reliant on the free system, such as California, would have to start from scratch and maintain their own servers to preserve exposure notifications after the May 11 cutoff. “There was discussion among some states, but I don’t think that’s going anywhere,” Virginia’s Stover says. The two national servers scheduled for shutdown are operated by the Association of Public Health Laboratories, or APHL, a group that serves as a liaison between local and federal health agencies. Emergency funds from the Centers for Disease Control have supported the servers since they went online in August 2020. But President Biden announced in January of this year that he would let the declaration of a national public health emergency—and the funding that comes with it—expire on May 11.
One of APHL’s servers acts as a sort of nationwide clearinghouse for the Bluetooth data that records phones in proximity, enabling users to travel to any participating state and still get Covid exposure alerts. The other server helps verify that a particular user tested positive before anonymously notifying their close contacts, although a few states established their own setups for this function.
States giving up on exposure notifications are able to send mobile push notifications to users informing them that the system is being shut down, and that users can delete their state app or turn off the service in their smartphone settings, depending on how it is set up on their devices.
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