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ARCHIVED - Spanish Covid Radar tracker app can launch nationally in September following successful trials
The app will be available in English from the middle of August onwards
As the Covid Pandemic progresses, one of the big challenges facing governments is how to limit the economic harm of mass lockdowns and rapidly identifying Covid positives in order to close a tight protective circle around a positive case and their immediate contacts is seen as being an effective means of limiting the spread of the virus.
This of course, depends on the ability of the government to detect a case before symptoms appear and the individual concerned has the opportunity to infect other people, a difficult task given the invisibility of the virus.
Contact tracing is laborious and time-consuming, to say nothing of costly, but the use of mobile applications can greatly reduce the manual labour of contact tracing and rapidly identify a larger number of possible positive cases.
Implementation of a contact tracing system has to be undertaken in line with the creation of compatible Covid testing systems and measures to ensure that those identified as positive comply with the quarantine request; at the moment this is proving difficult, as the economic implications for individuals told to quarantine for 14 days are not always compatible with their personal circumstances and work commitments, hence the ongoing problems of new outbreaks. ( A small example of this occurred locally to the office this week; an outbreak was identified in a local agricultural firm. Employees had continued to go to work knowing full well that they were suffering from Covid but were reluctant to take time off work for economic reasons. The result was that 48 people were found to be contagious within a week once contact tracers identified the source of the outbreak as being work-related, and the company was forced to close down. Now all of those living in the same aprtment blocks as the majority of the workers must quarantine, preventing all of them from going to work, a huge financial blow for a large group of low-income families).
But all of these issues will have to be addressed if humanity is going to overcome the virus, as otherwise we will be dragged into a never-ending circle of new cases as the virus has already proven that it has no respect for seasonality, for age or for herd immunity and can re-infect and continue to spread as long as humans continue to have contact with other people; contact, interaction and communication the essence of our humanity.
Here in Spain, the Spanish Government has supported the development of a Covid Radar Tracker app which is now ready to launch nationwide from September 15th onwards following successful trials in the Canary Island of La Gomera.
The app was tested between June 29th and July 31st, a period in which four waves of fictitious outbreaks of COVID-19 were simulated, allowing the developers to test the way that the app responded to the situation and how it worked from a users point of view.
The idea behind the app is that its use is voluntary, so the pilot test was less focused on the technological aspect of the app, as this has already been tested and is known to work, but more to assess the interaction of people with it, and whether they would download and use it.
3,200 of the 22,000 residents of La Gomera opted to install the app on their mobile phones for the duration of the test. Although the app. only worked on the island, more than 60,000 also downloaded it throughout Spain!
The app. uses Bluetooth to warn users if they have been within two or three meters of an infected person in the fourteen days prior to a new diagnosis and is designed not to replace manual tracers but to create a complementary tool for manual trackers in order to increase the chances of “catching” cases in the early stages.
It does not use geolocation or collect any data from users, but assigns random numbers to the mobile phones of those who voluntarily install it to warn them that they have to contact the health authorities because they have recently been close to an infected individual. In order to maintain anonymity, the individual with whom they have had contact is never identified.
The Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence, Carme Artigas, described the test as "highly satisfactory", and said that the app. doubled the detection rate of manual contact tracers, detecting an average of 6.4 close contacts for each positive, compared to the capacity of manual trackers in the Canary Islands, which is around 3 cases per positive contact.
According to the results, 61% of the fictitious cases of coronavirus responded, with 78% doing so in less than 24 hours.
Users gave the app. an 8 out of ten rating for ease of use.
For the secretary of state, the application "sees more than us", "is faster" and "more anonymous", so the assessment "cannot be more positive", as in all three phases of its development the project has shown "reliability and precision".
On Monday the director of the Coordination Center for Health Alerts and Emergencies, Fernando Simón, met with representatives of the 17 autonomous regions of Spain as it will be up to each individual regional government to implement the system in its own regional territory and ensure that the contact tracing system is installed within their own regional health service systems.
Each region of Spain runs its own regional health service, so although the national Government can recommend its use, it can´t force a regional Government to implement the service.
Each region will have to provide a code to those choosing to download the app. allowing them to notify the close contacts with whom they have interacted in recent days so that a message can be sent to contact the corresponding health authority for a test.
The regions will also have to provide the phone system and numbers so that participants can contact their local health authority.
The secretary of state estimates that this application will be available nationwide from September 15th.
From August 10th, some communities, such as the Canary Islands or the Balearic Islands can start to develop the app for use in their own territories and from August 15th the application will be made available in English, for the use of tourists visiting Spain in the communities that choose to install the system.
Obviously there is likely to be resistance from some regions which have a separatist agenda and are likely to demand applications in their own regional languages, but the system will be available to them should they choose to implement it. Currently these are the areas of Spain suffering the worst outbreaks.
Some areas of Spain are already implementing schemes to manually contact trace; Castilla La Mancha for example, is manually taking contact details from those using nocturnal leisure venues in order to contact trace them and in Galicia travellers from outside areas with outbreaks are being obliged to supply contact details when entering the region.