NHS Covid-19 App: England and Wales Get Smartphone Contact Tracking for Ages 16+

People living in England and Wales are urged to download the official government contact tracing app after its official launch.

NHS Covid-19 instructs users to self-isolate for 14 days if it detects that they were around someone who has the virus.

It also has a registry scanner to alert owners if a place they have visited is found to be a hotspot for an outbreak.

Anyone over the age of 16 is requested to install the app on their smartphone.

That’s a change from the trials, which were limited to those 18 and older.

The measure reflects the desire of health chiefs for the software to be used by as many students as possible in colleges and universities of higher education.

The age limit is online with the Protect Scotland contact tracker app. And the health chiefs behind Northern Ireland’s StopCOVID NI have said they intend to release a new version that accepts under-18s later this month.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said that with rising rates of coronavirus infection, the app could help keep people safe.

“I urge everyone who can to download and use the app to protect themselves and their loved ones,” he said.

The government originally intended to launch the app months ago. But problems with the initial design and the addition of additional features meant it was only ready for its final public test in August.

A tech expert who has followed the initiative acknowledged that the team involved had worked hard to address concerns about privacy and transparency, but said broader issues could still limit its impact.

“Not only is the app late to launch, it will be hampered by delays in the test system,” Rachel Coldicutt told the BBC.

“If you don’t have symptoms, will a push notification saying you were close to someone a week ago cause you and your family to isolate yourself and spend days updating the testing website, trying to find a test?”

Although the app allows users to request a coronavirus test and automatically obtain the results, the government does not believe it will complicate efforts to meet demand.

The application is available only for smartphones, not for tablets, smart watches or other devices.

Phones must have Android 6.0 (released in 2015) or iOS 13.5 (released in May 2020) and Bluetooth 4.0 or higher.

And some of the latest Huawei phones are excluded.

The notification will instruct the recipient to self-isolate for fifteen days and activate the start of the app’s countdown clock.

Even if the recipient has no symptoms or a negative subsequent test result, they must remain home the entire time.

Unlike when a human contact tracker orders someone to isolate themselves, the app keeps the identity of the subject a secret.

Those who have not received such an alert, but complete the app’s symptom checker and meet the criteria, will be directed to self-isolate for eight days and will be directed to an external website to book a trial.

Automated contact tracing is designed to complement the work done by humans by helping to identify encounters with strangers, for example, someone who is near a user while waiting in a queue outside a store.

When someone anonymously shares a positive Covid-19 test result through the app, a process developed by Apple and Google causes other users’ smartphones to check whether they have recently detected the infected person’s phone.

But smartphones weren’t designed for this purpose, and the readings involved aren’t always accurate. This has raised fears of “false positives” – people being instructed to isolate themselves and who were never at risk.

However, health chiefs believe that a recent change in the calculations involved should help minimize the problem: they now take into account when the virus carrier was most contagious.

The Health Department has confirmed that users who ignore the app’s self-isolation warning are theoretically liable for fines of £ 1,000 or more.

However, because they do not have to identify themselves, officials acknowledge that it will normally be impossible to enforce.

One of the other main features of the application is a scanner that allows you to keep track of pubs, restaurants, barber shops and other places that the user has visited.

So far, the government says more than 160,000 companies have downloaded a unique code for their property.

The benefit is that if officials later identify a location as the center of an outbreak, they can update a database that phones regularly check for a match.

Users can then be told to isolate themselves and / or get tested, depending on the circumstances, without having to reveal their identities.

Other installations, including postal code-based threat updates and the latest guide details, are intended to encourage people to regularly check the app and change their behavior.

But a big challenge will be convincing them to download it in the first place:

To encourage adoption in England and Wales, the major mobile networks have agreed not to deduct the data used by the app from subscribers’ monthly allowances.

Also, the app now supports more languages ​​than the trial version, adding Turkish, Arabic, Mandarin, Romanian, and soon Polish.

And now it allows users to remove visits to individual places from the app’s “digital diary”. This followed comments from victims of domestic abuse, whose partners often check their phones.

However, a change may be less popular.

Those who are told to go into self-isolation due to a contact tracing match will not be able to challenge the decision.