LONDON: A smartphone app designed to help contain the spread of Covid-19 when lockdown measures are eased is “two to three weeks” away from being rolled out, MPs have heard.
Matthew Gould, chief executive of NHSX, the health service’s digital innovation arm, told the Science and Technology Committee the voluntary tool would be trialled in a “small area” shortly to help gauge its success.
He said: “We are, I hope, on course to have the app ready for when it will be needed, for the moment when the country looks to have the tools to come out of lockdown safely. We are going as fast as we can, we have teams of people looking at it 24/7.” But Gould admitted regret after the committee heard work to develop the app did not start until March 7, two weeks before lockdown measures were introduced across the UK. He said: “Yes it could have done, and with the benefit of hindsight I wish that it had.”
The app will work by using a smartphone’s Bluetooth technology to keep an anonymous record of other smartphone users they come into close proximity with.
The user will then have the option to send data to the app if they begin to show signs of having contracting coronavirus — or being found to have tested positive for Covid-19 — which will then send a notification to others who have been in close contact with the phone user.
Professor Christophe Fraser, senior group leader in pathogen dynamics at University of Oxford Big Data Institute, told the committee that widespread uptake of a contact-tracing app would likely keep the reproduction rate – seen as crucial for easing lockdown measures – low.
Gould said it would be “tough” to get 80 per cent of smartphone users to install the contact-tracing app, but said encouraging people to do so needed to become part of the government’s “core message” in limiting the spread of the virus.
He said developers were working with the Information Commissioner’s Office to make sure the app was compliant with data protection laws, but said phone users could be “confident” their personal data would not be compromised, nor would it be shared with the private sector.
He added: “The system we have developed of people using randomised identifiers, storing it on the phone, uploading it when they become systematic, I think it squares the circle of being fast moving and doing what we want it to do and protecting people’s privacy.”
Speaking in the Commons, Solicitor General Michael Ellis said that the app will be “heavily protected” and predicted that it will prove to be “very popular”.
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