Issues on Japanese COVID-19 Exposure Notifications Application (COCOA)

This study investigates problems related to COCOA, which is a smartphone app officially provided by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) that is designed to notify users when they have been in close contact with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) positive persons, and thus help the government and healthcare organizations contain the spread of the virus. The information we have obtained thus far indicates that poor utilization rates of the app are due to significant program flaws, which caused the initial usage to be sluggish, as well as the failures of various health centers to adequately provide polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing for COCOA notification recipients, which exacerbated sluggishness issues. Furthermore, a related survey revealed that although the government provides an integrated data system called the Health Center Real-time Information-sharing System on COVID-19 (Japanese abbreviation HER-SYS), information on fever outpatients (hospital names, locations, consultation times, presence or absence of PCR testing, etc.) corresponding to each local government is still not fully available.