Quote Of The Year

Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"

or

H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Friday, August 21, 2020

With A New Outbreak It Is All Go For New Zealand’s Contact Tracing Systems.

 This appeared last week.

COVID Tracer App alert sent as virus re-emerges

Wednesday, 12 August 2020  

eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

The alert function on the NZ COVID Tracer App was used by government for the first time this morning, as registrations reach almost one million. 

The Ministry of Health released the app in May to allow people to track their movements by scanning QR codes displayed at businesses and organisations. This assists contract tracing if there is community transmission of Covid-19, which has emerged earlier this week in Auckland.

The app alert went out to everyone who had signed into the Heritage Farm and Skyline Gondola in Rotorua at the same time as members of a South Auckland family who have since tested positive for Covid-19.

Uptake and use of the app had been lagging as New Zealand clocked up 100 days without a case of community transmission, however director general of health Ashley Bloomfield said at a media briefing on August 13 that the app now has 986,000 registered users, an increase of 338,000 over the previous 48 hours.

“I understand that there was some slowness for people in downloading the app because of the volume of people who were doing so, and there were some caps in place by the App Store and also Google Play: those have now been increased or lifted so that shouldn't be a problem now,” he said. 

More than 138,000 posters have been created, an increase of 51,000 in the last 48 hours, and the app has now recorded over 2.6 million poster scans and nearly 450,000 manual entries into people’s digital diaries. This is a huge increase on the average numbers from last week.

Businesses nationwide now must display a government QR code for any visitors to scan and they must comply before August 19 to avoid penalties.

More here:

https://www.hinz.org.nz/news/521456/COVID-Tracer-App-alert-sent-as-virus-re-emerges.htm

You can read more about the Tracer App here:

https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-novel-coronavirus-resources-and-tools/nz-covid-tracer-app

This link provides explanations of the tracing app and how QR codes at each location and extrance are being used by the app to record where an individual has been to allow even more rapid contact tracing and to allow alerts to be sent to an individual if a positive patient has been at the same location at about the same time.

Here is the app update of the 16th August:

NZ COVID Tracer

NZ COVID Tracer has now recorded 1,374,200 registered users, which is an increase of 71,000 in the previous 24 hours.

There have now been 193,505 QR codes generated – an increase of 7,025 in the past 24 hours.

The number of poster scans has now reached 5,293,568. 

Here is the link:

https://www.health.govt.nz/news-media/media-releases/13-new-cases-covid-19-0

They are sure moving with great speed to track and trace!

Fascinating to watch from “across the ditch”

David.

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