Support In Luxembourg For App-based Contact Tracing Of Covid-19

"Strategies adopted by authorities to counteract the diffusion of the Covid-19 are largely based on social distancing measures, and on tracing the contacts of infected individuals. The ability to quickly identify those exposed to the virus has been widely recognized as a key element in Singapore's and Taiwan's successful epidemic containment. Among tracing strategies, the use of tracking applications ("apps") - software installed on mobile devices - has become prominent. Several countries are resorting to contact-tracing apps as crucial elements of their strategies to gradually ease lockdowns. This issue is also debated and studied in Luxembourg. Several smartphone tracking apps have been proposed to detect coronavirus exposure (O'Neill et al,.2020). By tracking users' contacts within a certain period of time, the apps enable quick identification and notification of Covid-19 exposure to all those users who have come in contact with a carrier. The use of tracking apps does not come without drawbacks. Concerns have been raised on data gathering, sharing, and use. Even if it were mandatory, a strategy based on tracking apps requires a substantial level of acceptance and adherence in the population to be effective. Recent simulation studies suggest that the epidemic could be stopped if approximately 60% of the adult population adopted a contact tracing app. For the time being, little is known about the propensity of Luxembourgish residents to accept and adopt a tracing app, or regarding their concerns. The project aims to investigate the current propensity of Luxembourgish residents to adopt COVID tracing app, as well as people's main concerns and how they change over time. Understanding the key barriers and facilitators associated with use of contact tracing applications may inform the public debate and help the design of better apps. The project will contribute to the ongoing cross-country study in Germany, France, UK, USA and Italy (Altmann et al. 2020, available here https://osf.io/n7w48/ ). Additionally, this research will address some of the limitations of the current studies, namely representativeness and the possibility to follow respondents over time using a newly constructed an online probability-based access panel based on STATEC data.