A month on, govt’s contract tracing app has few takers

BENGALURU: The contact tracing app introduced by the government over a month ago has so far seen only 3,000 downloads. Citizens could declare themselves as contacts of Covid-19 patients via the app or the infected could list their relatives as their contacts.The app was launched after multiple incidents of primary and secondary contacts of Covid-positive patients not revealing their identities due to the fear of being tested and made to quarantine. 

Munish Moudgil, Incharge Of State War Room and who introduced the app, said, “Anybody who is aware of the contacts of Covid-19 patients can give their details and we will verify them from our end and proceed with quarantining and testing them. There are people who do not want to reveal their identity. They will be anonymous, thanks to the app.”Until Tuesday, the state recorded 2,16,122 cases under investigation which means that health department and BBMP are still in the process of tracing the history.

Moudgil said that early contact tracing is important as it will help in curbing the spread of Covid-19. “Not revealing their contacts after testing positive leads to a huge source of infection. And not wearing a mask and not maintaining social distancing are also reasons. People need to be aware and reveal their contacts to the authorities to curb the spread.”

 How to use the app
After downloading the app, citizens can feed the patient’s SRF ID or mobile number, and list themselves as primary or secondary contacts. In case they don’t know the patient’s SRF ID, citizens can manually feed the patient’s name and other details into the app.There is also an option to geo-tag addresses, making it easy for officials to conduct contact tracing. After this, the backend team at the war room will ascertain if the data provided by app-users is accurate or not, before further action is taken.