A contact tracing system that alerts users of proximity to people infected with coronavirus was the most downloaded app in Switzerland last year.
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The SwissCovid app has been downloaded by 3,180,000 people since June 25, 2020. It has been declared a success by the Swiss authorities.
“Up to around two million people actively use the SwissCovid app, thus helping to break the chain of infection and being warned of the risk of infection more quickly,” the government stated on ThursdayExternal link.
“In this way, users make a significant contribution to combating the pandemic.”
A code is generated when someone using the app reports being infected with Covid-19. Alerts are then sent out to any other app users who had been close enough to the Covid sufferer to have potentially been infected themselves.
Some 83,117 codes have been issued to date, but privacy rules make it impossible to determine how many people received a warning.
SwissCovid has been fine-tuned several times to improve its efficiency, including an adaptation to enable interoperability with a German Covid-19 warning app.
“We are currently working on an expansion of the SwissCovid app, which should make it possible to inform even more people anonymously and easily about the risk of infection,” the Swiss authorities communicated on Thursday.
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