Germany and Ireland both triumphed over their success in launching contact tracking apps.
But there is evidence that they are doing what they are designed for: to warn people that they may be infected with the virus?
Not yet - and the privacy conscious way in which they are designed could mean that we will never know how effective they have been.
Last month, the British government announced that it was abandoning a centralized NHS contact tracking app for England and moving to a decentralized version based on the Apple-Google toolkit. This model was favored by privacy activists because the pairing process takes place on users' smartphones rather than on a central computer, providing a greater degree of anonymity.
But the government stressed that the new version would not come quickly, and Boris Johnson told the House of Commons that no country in the world had a functioning contact tracking app.
Opposition leader Keir Starmer of Labor immediately pointed to Germany, as did many others who contested the prime minister's request.
The German Corona-Warn-App was launched nationally in June. A few days ago, the Robert Koch Institute provided an update on its progress, celebrating the fact that it had now been installed by around 16 million people.
"A successful start that speaks of great interest and acceptance by the population," said a note from the app developer.
Keep in mind, however, that there are 83 million Germans and it is thought that more than half of the population needs an app before it is truly effective.
"The app works," added institute president Prof Lothar Wieler. He went on to say that around 500 app users have tested positive for the virus and "have had the opportunity to notify others via the app".
But then he said, "We can't say exactly how many people have been warned, because of the app's decentralized approach."
In other words, we don't know if the software is performing its key function.
To know the performance of your app, it is also essential to understand if it is producing many false positives or false negatives - in bald terms, if the software is not alerting people who have been in close contact with an infected user and sending alerts to those who have not.
This is important to know, because studies have indicated that Bluetooth is an unreliable way of determining the distance between two people in some common situations.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) told us that he also didn't know it because, once again, the log history he should have drawn on "remains with users, encrypted on their smartphones".
We asked ourselves as an alternative solution if the German manual contact trackers could provide RKI with a register of the people who had come to their attention after being notified by the app.
No, the answer has arrived. Local municipalities track contacts manually and do not share this information.
RKI added that he hopes that scientific tests will eventually evaluate the impact of the app in the "medium to long term", but has not yet figured out how to achieve this.
Switzerland faces the same problem.
His health department also pointed his finger at SwissCovid's use of the Apple and Google model.
"We therefore have the same limitations in terms of statistics. We do not know - and we have no way of finding out - the number of people notified by the app or any false positives / false negatives," a spokesman told the BBC.
"Looks positive"
No caution from Cian Ó Maidín, whose Nearform company is behind the Ireland app.
The Covid Tracker app was launched two weeks ago and quickly attracted 1.3 million users, around a third of smartphone users in Ireland.
Nearform is also developing a very similar app for Northern Ireland, which decided to go it alone after the NHS project had problems. And Ó Maidín suggested that other parts of the United Kingdom and major American states may also soon be customers.
"This is a solved problem," he told the BBC.
"We have a solution that works well, has been tested, has been verified. We are able to set up a government from the moment we leave for launch in a month."
He later diluted it in "it may not be perfectly resolved right now," but continued to eliminate concerns about effectiveness.
"We do not yet have a complete data set, but the first data seem really positive," he said, addressing the Irish HSE health service for a more detailed answer.
We have actually been chasing them on this for days and will provide an update if we hear again.
Since the Irish app is based on the same model as Germany and Switzerland, it is unclear why it should generate more data.
Although there is a potential caveat: during the installation process, users are asked to accept the collection of "anonymous metrics" on the effectiveness of contact tracking processes.
In any case, Mr. Ó Maidín says that we should not worry excessively about lost or wrong games.
"The perfect shouldn't be an enemy of the good," he says.
The problem is that with so little data exposed, can we even distinguish the good from the bad?
Problems abound
There have also been problems with contact tracking apps in other countries:
- Downloads of the contact confirmation application (Cocoa) in Japan slowed to 7.7 million on Monday - the country's population is over 126 million. A software bug prevented users from recording positive tests for the virus, but this issue was addressed in an update released on July 13th. But the Japan Times reports that only 27 positive cases have been registered since then via the app.
- Immunes in Italy were discharged by around 4.2 million Italians, far below the government's target: the country's population is around 60 million. Local authorities suggest that there has been limited interest because the spread of the virus is perceived to be under control, but they expect it to change if a second wave begins.
- CovidSafe in Australia has not yet identified anyone who has not already been reported by other contact tracking efforts. Zdnet reports that it continues to be troubled by a number of flaws that have caused it to lose matches and that iPhones have tried to connect to unrelated devices. A former medical officer told local news that the cost of developing and promoting the app had been 70 million Australian dollars ($ 49 million; £ 38 million).
- On Monday, France's data watchdog wrote to the country's government asking to make changes to its StopCovid app, to make it compliant with privacy laws. The latest official update says it has been downloaded 2.3 million times.
