The app no one is using

Stuff reports:

The Government keeps urging New Zealanders to use the NZ Covid Tracer app but Kiwis aren’t responding.

Now, one public health expert says it should probably be abandoned.

Figures from the Ministry of Health show QR codes on posters in businesses and other places frequented by the public have been scanned a total of about 1.43 million times in the nearly two months the app has been available. That’s an average of only around 25,000 a day.

So less than 1% of people using it daily.

But professor Nick Wilson from the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago said 10,000 users a day would be just 0.2 per cent of the population.

“That’s just microscopic. It’s just not working,” Wilson said. “It should probably be abandoned.”

For an app to be more effective than manual contact tracing, uptake by the population would need to be much higher than 50 per cent.

So pretty much useless.

One was a Bluetooth-enabled smart card that everyone carried around, along the lines of a system being developed in Singapore.

According to the Singapore government, the “tokens” it started to hand out in late June exchange Bluetooth signals with other nearby tokens, or with an app it launched in March.

When a token user is identified with Covid-19, the data on their token can be used to identify other token users who have been in close contact with the infected person.

A much better system. No manual checking in.