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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Exposure Notifications was designed to be deprecated, though? It was a pandemic thing.

The pandemic is ongoing, we've just started calling the disease "endemic" but that doesn't make it less dangerous.

We have however wound down most of the protective measures. Germany has retired the official bluetooth contact tracing app earlier this year. I wouldn't be surprised if Google retires theirs this year or the next.

> The pandemic is ongoing, we've just started calling the disease "endemic" but that doesn't make it less dangerous

It's just as dangerous (well, it's probably not, due to less lethal variants winning over more lethal ones), but that measure is not what makes it no longer a pandemic.

Endemic diseases are defined as diseases with relatively stable case numbers confined to a localized area. This obviously doesn't apply: COVID is not confined to a localized area.

Per the WHO[1] and the CDC[2] COVID is still a pandemic.

[1]: https://www.who.int/news/item/30-01-2023-statement-on-the-fo...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/end-of...

> Germany has retired the official bluetooth contact tracing app earlier this year. I wouldn't be surprised if Google retires theirs this year or the next.

Google does not have their own app. Exposure Notifications is the cross-vendor low-level API which apps like Germany's is (...was) using.

Yeah, someone else pointed that out on another comment and I wasn't aware of that before. However it seems like most countries with apps built on this API seem to have given up on public contact tracing and sunset their apps so the API might go away sooner rather than later.

I mean I agree but they're just following whatever everyone else is doing, unfortunately.

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