Inside STAT: North Dakota's contact tracing apps may be a litmus test for Covid-19 tech

A VIEW OF THE CARE19 APP. (STEPHEN GROVES/AP)

What started out as a fun project to track football fans from North Dakota making the annual trek to Texas for the national football championship game is now at the center of a contact tracing effort for Covid-19. When the pandemic began earlier this year, Microsoft engineer Tim Brookins texted his old colleague, the governor of North Dakota, to offer help. And it set the path for the app that Brookins built for football — called Bison Tracker — to become the foundation for two contact tracing apps that Brookins is now developing for the state. And North Dakota is a great place to test the waters as the state offers a mix of highly urban areas as well as vast rural swaths with little to no cellphone service. STAT's Erin Brodwin has more here.