If you just got an iPhone 12 or iPhone 12 Pro, you need to make sure COVID-19 exposure notifications are enabled if you want to do your best to avoid a deadly virus

Setting up a new iPhone 12 from a backup of an old iPhone may disable notifications for the COVID-19 contact tracking app, the BBC reported While the app itself will not be disabled, this means that one could miss important warnings about possible exposure to the coronavirus

Currently, the issue appears to affect only the official National Health Service (NHS) contact tracing app used in the UK However, it could affect other contract tracing apps

However, our iPhone 12 review machine also found that Exposure Notifications are turned off in the US

If you are concerned that you may not be receiving the correct coronavirus notifications, you need to go into the native iOS Settings app and go to the "Exposure Notifications" submenu

There, simply tap the option to turn on "Exposure Notifications" and you are all set to receive notifications from the coronavirus tracking and tracing app

After turning on Exposure Notifications and selecting the country and state, we were told that there is an exposure notification app in our area In this case, it was the New Jersey Department of Health We downloaded the app and enabled the notification permission

The crux of the problem seems to lie in iPhone backups via iCloud: downloading a backup from iCloud usually does not re-enable all permissions granted to the backed up app when you set up a new iPhone This is because the apps are not backed up to iCloud As a result, apps like Contact Tracker do not have permissions to use Bluetooth-based matching and tracking features

The Twitter account for the NHS COVID-19 app tweeted a list of devices on which the app was tested, and the iPhone 12 was not among them, so given that the iPhone 12 has just been released, such an issue is not necessarily not a big surprise

Some users have reported that simply deleting and reinstalling the app will enable the notification option, but this is hardly an elegant solution to the problem

Approximately 18 million people have installed the NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app, so given the popularity of the iPhone, many could be affected by this issue However, we are hopeful that NHS is aware of this issue and will push out an update to ensure that important notifications are not silently disabled when users want to turn them on