780 thousand downloads and 32 have already contacted the SNS

Have you installed the STAYAWAY COVID app? Some say we are in the beginning of a second phase of COVID-19. The figures for the last three days were not exactly “pretty”, but it is important to highlight the number of hospitalizations and deaths that remains stable.

To help in this arduous task of controlling the pandemic, Portugal already has an application, STAYAWAY COVID for digital contact tracking. So far the application has been downloaded 780 thousand times and 32 calls have been made to the SNS 24.

So far there have been about 780 thousand downloads of the STAYAWAY COVID mobile application, a "quite encouraging" figure, the Health Minister said last Friday.
At the press conference to update the data on the evolution of the pandemic in Portugal, Marta Temido also revealed that, so far, 32 calls have been made to the Contact Center SNS 24 by people informed through the STAYAWAY COVID mobile application ( app) has been in contact with someone infected.
Developed by the Institute of Engineering, Technology and Science of Systems and Computing, this mobile application allows to identify, quickly and anonymously and through physical proximity, the contagion networks by COVID-19, informing users that they have been in the last 14 days, in the same space as someone infected with the new coronavirus.

The STAYAWAY COVID application does NOT use geolocation services
To begin with, it is important to know that The application does not track the user's location or use geolocation services. However, using the “Exposure Notification” (EN) functions of the operating system does not require or use the GPS interface.  The request made by Android is incorrect and causes concern in all applications that use EN.  Google is aware of the problem, but in its own words, it is "a limitation of the operating system itself."  The Bluetooth Low Energy Service (BLE) is, in the Android operating system, connected to “Location Services” so they must be connected to be able to use it.
The data on mobile phones is deleted by the STAYAWAY COVID application itself, at the latest, after 14 days and all are deleted when the application is uninstalled.  Online data, similarly, is deleted after a maximum of 14 days.  The entire system will be interrupted when the end of the pandemic in Portugal is declared.
With COVID-19, we are estimated to be infectious on average for 10 days.  In part of this time we may not have any symptoms, but 44% of infections occur precisely when we are still asymptomatic.  It is precisely in this period, and to reduce this 44%, that the use of digital tracking with the STAYAWAY COVID application is important.