In a corner of the home screen of my phone, to this day, the covid tracker app remains. I do not recall when last I opened it. From a journalism perspective, it was actually a useful tool during the height of the pandemic because of the various daily figures it provided on cases, check-ins, and so forth. And so, when I heard yesterday that it would be abolished this summer, I opened it one last time to check something: How many check ins were there?
Of all the things that were fascinating about the pandemic, the check-ins on the covid app every day were perhaps the thing that astonished me the most. On some days, during the height of the panic, over a million people in Ireland would go onto their phone, open an app, and tell the Government that they were healthy and had no symptoms. Why?