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The number of cases of contagion by the new coronavirus continues to increase and in recent days it has been successively more than a thousand positive cases. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the national health authorities have confirmed a total of 2,094 deaths and 87,913 infections due to the new coronavirus and the Government wants the STAYAWAY COVID application that was developed by INESC TEC to be a tool to help break chains of contagion. . is used more.
“Everything we can do to accelerate the use of the application is important,” said Luís Goes Pinheiro, president of Shared Services of the Ministry of Health, during the press conference on the review of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The application has already been downloaded more than 1.4 million times, but the use of codes by users who test positive for COVID has been reduced, and the latest data points to the use of 116 codes. SAPO TEK has questioned the different entities on the issue of codes and this week Expresso reported that only 430 codes were generated for use in the application until October 8.
For this reason, the Ministry of Health wants to intensify the training of the doctors who generate the codes that are then entered into the application. “This week there will be a webinar and other operations to ensure that there are no operators who are unaware of the functions they must perform,” concluded Luís Goes Pinheiro.
In a conference, the president of SPMS states, however, that the use of codes is “in line with other European countries” and refers to the examples from other countries.
“Austria has around 900 thousand downloads and had 56 codes uploaded, Italy has seven million more downloads and 257 uploaded codes, Finland, which started around when Portugal started, has 2.3 million downloads and 158 uploaded codes,” he stresses.
Voluntary use of codes and possibility of updating
Even with the issuance of more codes, there is no guarantee that all of them will be used in the application, as users have the ability not to.
“This is an application based on the freedom to download, use, insert the code that is generated and contact the SNS24 if it is considered a high-risk contact. However, it is important that everything we can do to speed up the application is welcome ”, defends Luís Goes Pinheiro.
The possibility of making updates to the application is still being studied, in line with the National Commission for Data Protection, as stated by the president of the Shared Services of the Ministry of Health.
“As we know, this is an application that had a great concern about respecting personal data. Within this legal framework, we will try to create conditions to expedite some situations related to the application, ”said Luís Goes Pinheiro.
