COVID-19 Contact-Confirming Application, abbreviated as COCOA, is a

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, identified in Wuhan, China, in December ...

application for smartphones provided by the

Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare The is a cabinet level ministry of the Japanese government. It is commonly known as in Japan. The ministry provides services on health, labour and welfare. It was formed with the merger of the former Ministry of Health and Welfare or and the ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

. The application uses

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...

to detect and record suspected close contacts between users. If the contact is diagnosed with COVID-19, the user will be notified. After receiving the notification, the user can consider self-isolation or go to a medical institution for treatment.

Development

On May 20, 2020,

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

and

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

began to provide the public health authorities of various countries with the new coronavirus infection notification (English: Exposure Notification). On May 26, 2020, the "New Coronavirus Infectious Disease Countermeasures Technical Team" released a specification that defines the contact confirmation application and related systems that use this API. After Persol Process & Technology received the project management and maintenance order with a price of 41.04 million yen, it subcontracted it to two companies, including

Microsoft Japan Microsoft Japan, officially , is a subsidiary of Microsoft based in Japan. Their headquarters are near to Shinagawa station at Minato-ku district of Tokyo. History In 1978, Kazuhiko Nishi, co-founder of ASCII Publisher, partnered with Bill ...

and Fixer. The application itself is developed by the open source community "COVID-19 Radar

" composed of private IT technicians. The members include Japanese Microsoft employees, and Persol Process & Technology is responsible for maintenance and adjustments. On June 15, the Nikkei reported that the application was developed by Microsoft in the United States, and Microsoft in Japan later denied the content of the report. At 15:00 on June 19, 2020,

Google Play Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store and formerly the Android Market, is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certified devices running on the Android (operating sys ...

and

App Store An App Store (or app marketplace) is a type of digital distribution platform for computer software called applications, often in a mobile context. Apps provide a specific set of functions which, by definition, do not include the running of the co ...

began to provide the 1.0.0 (initial trial version) version of the application. This version does not link to the information control and management support system (HER-SYS) of people infected with the new coronavirus, and there are many problems. Version 1.1.1 (trial version) fixes the problems of the previous version, and after accessing the above system, it will be published to the App Store on June 30, 2020, and to Google Play on July 1, 2020. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare stated that it will maintain the trial version for about one month after its release (June 19, 2020), revising the design and functions. On September 13, 2022, Digital Minister Taro Kono said that COCOA will be discontinued as Tokyo continues to simply details on COVID-19 patients' names and other details.

COVID-19 Radar Japan

The initiator Hirose told Diamond Online that the plan was promoted by himself and 5 other core members, including Hirose, 4 core members agreed to open the name for an interview. * Hirose Kazukai (the initiator of COVID-19 Radar Japan) * Yasuda Kristina (External External person in charge) * Noriko Matsumoto (designer in charge) * Tetsuhiko Kodama (designer in charge)

Function

Record contact information

As long as the smart phones of both parties are installed with COCOA and Bluetooths are turned on, the devices will record each other's data (identification code) and store it as "contact information". The contact information is an encrypted record, and personal identity cannot be identified. After 14 days of storage, the recorded information will be automatically delete. For

privacy Privacy (, ) is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. The domain of privacy partially overlaps with security, which can include the concepts of a ...

reasons, the application does not use personally identifiable information such as

phone numbers A telephone number is a sequence of digits assigned to a landline telephone subscriber station connected to a telephone line or to a wireless electronic telephony device, such as a radio telephone or a mobile telephone, or to other devices f ...

and

location information Mobile phone tracking is a process for identifying the location of a mobile phone, whether stationary or moving. Localization may be effected by a number of technologies, such as the multilateration of radio signals between (several) cell towers o ...

(GPS).

Notify when contact with confirmed cases

A confirmed case of COVID-19 confirmed by PCR testing will receive a "processing number" issued by the health center after the diagnosis is confirmed. After entering COCOA, people who have been in contact with the confirmed case will be notified. The Japanese government stated that the processing number of a confirmed case will only be sent to the confirmed case itself by mail, etc., to prevent abusers from falsely reporting the diagnosis.

Issues

Can't find application issue

When it was released on June 19, 2020, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare urged users to search for "contact confirmation app" (contact confirmation app) in the App Store and other places, and install it (download) for free. After the release, many people reported that they "cannot download" or "cannot search". The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare finally published the application link on its official website, and clicked it to go directly to the installation interface.

Confirmed information registration problem

In version 1.0.0 of the app, when registering confirmed information, even if the input processing number is not issued by the "New Coronavirus Infected Persons and Other Information Grasp and Management Support System", it will display "completed". After receiving the report, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare stated that it is temporarily suspending the issuance of the processing number. Since the system will check the processing number, if the entered processing number has not been issued, it will not be registered as a confirmed case, and other users will not receive contact notifications. This problem has been fixed in version 1.1.1 of the application.

Starting day display problem

In version 1.0.0 of the application, the start date will be displayed as today's date. The 1.1.1 version of the application has fixed this problem.

Confirmed cases cannot be registered in the app issue

The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare stated that it will stop issuing the processing number required for registration information since July 11 due to "the discovery of a confirmed case of new coronavirus infection that could not be registered in the app". The revised version (1.1.2) will be released on iOS on July 13 and Android on July 14 to fix this problem.

Problem reporting method

The Tuberculosis and Infectious Diseases Division of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare stated that if problems are found, they can report through the consultation email address listed in the app and Q&A, or go to the issue report discussion area (Issues) in the GitHub project.

References

{{Reflist
Government contact confirmation app, supplier is Persol
Japan Economic News. 2020-06-17

020-06-19 The hyphen-minus is the most commonly used type of hyphen, widely used in digital documents. It is the only character that looks like a minus sign or a dash in many character sets such as ASCII or on most keyboards, so it is also used as such. ...

(Archived from the original on 2020-06-19).
Notification of close contact with corona-infected persons Started using the app "COCOA". NHK News
2020-06-19