@kaia :blobcatgooglypen: so it could have been the better effect when they would have created a 200 million game that would actually be good so that the people would have been at home playing the game then...
@lanodan@kaia The Dutch app also cost around 20 million to develop which is insane considering we're a much smaller country than Germany. So we spent a lot more money per citizen.
Our government also spent 4.3 million on advertising it.
@lanodan@kaia I actually wrote an essay about contact tracing apps while I was in university (and we were still at the start of the pandemic) and even back then I had referenced studies that suggested that contact tracing would only start having a real effect at stopping the pandemic if more than 60% of the population started using it.
No country got anywhere near these installation numbers because of fears over "privacy" which kind of saddens me.
The Dutch covid app is very well designed from a privacy perspective. Even I used our contact tracing app during the pandemic because I actually trust it, and you know I'm a tinfoil hat wearing free software nerd.
When I see tech illiterate boomers using their Facebook and their TikTok while they have "privacy concerns" against installing a well designed free software app that is there to only protect their HEALTH I just die a little inside.
@SuperDicq@kaia Meanwhile at the time it apparead here I would have had to port the thing to fucking Java ME on a phone that probably was too outdated to have the bluetooth feature so I just didn't bother.
But well most places where I went outside had you write down email or phone number, interestingly only few people actually wondered about the privacy of that kind of stuff, which is much worse than even a meh contact tracing app as then everyone seeing it could take a picture of a large chunk of the list.
While you know while the development and operation costs of most contact tracing apps are definitely out of proportion I would not immediately conclude that this means that the apps were a complete failure.
While hard to quantify in exact numbers these contact tracing apps have during their lifetime probably prevented hundreds of thousands of cases of COVID.
And there's one thing that is definitely more expensive than incompetent government software development, which is healthcare.
Maybe the 200 million euro spent on the contact tracing app has saved 300 million euro in healthcare expenses?
@engler@lanodan@kaia@meso Let's say an intensive care bed costs 3000 euro per patient per day, with an average intensive care patient spending about 14 days on the intensive care, you'll very easily reach the 200 million euro mark.
@SuperDicq@lanodan@kaia@engler >Maybe the 200 million euro spent on the contact tracing app has saved 300 million euro in healthcare expenses?
they couldve spent 2 million on it and saved 300 millions euro in healthcare expenses
@meso@kaia@engler@SuperDicq In fact France, with it's mess of an app with actual privacy issues at first (leaky protocol implementation, ReCaptcha, …) and a crypto algorithm no one heard of before ("Skinny-64/192", they used fucking 3DES at first…), spent 9 millions €.
@lanodan@meso@kaia@engler What I hated most about the way the Dutch government did smartphone things during the pandemic is not the contact tracing app, but actually the proof of testing/vaccination app.
In order to present proof of testing or vaccination we needed to use an app for that. They did not give out any physical proof of vaccination or testing.
Even though the testing/vaccination app was fully free software and available on fdroid I would've preferred a physical proof (like a card or note) to be an option aswell.
@meso@kaia Wait I'm doing some more reading now and 20 million is the cost of development, with monthly operation costs being 2 to 3 million euro so I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up costing 100 to 200 million euro at the end of its lifetime actually.
@kaia lets say a dev costs 200k with taxes and offces etc. 81mio would be 400 devs for a year. or 100 for 4 years. seems reasonable tbh
1000 devs for a year or better 2000 for 6 months since it needed to be done fast for the covid app. seems unreasonable til u remember it had to work on android and ios
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