Date Published: 25/08/2020
ARCHIVED - Spanish Government offers 2,000 Army trained contact tracers to the autonomous regions
ARCHIVED ARTICLE The Prime Minister said that figure could be increased if necessary through additional training
On Tuesday Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez gave a press conference following a meeting of the Council of Ministers to announce the position of his Government in relation to the growing number of Covid-19 cases in Spain.
This weekend the total number of cases has increased by just under 20,000 as the virus runs out of control in some areas of the country.
One of the key weapons in the arsenal of the Government is the use of contact tracing in order to identify potential avenues of infection and isolate Covid positives.
The Government has already successfully tested the CovidRadar App, which is now in an implementaion phase in 7 regions and can be downloaded in any region, pending an authorisation code from the appropriate regional government to set it active.
The Prime Minister urged the regional governments to bring the App. into operation as quickly as possible, considering that "with 20% downloads, the number of infections can be reduced by up to 30%".
Andalusia, Cantabria, Aragon, Extremadura, the Canary Islands, Castilla y León and the Balearic Islands (from this Monday) are the first regions to have the development fully operational, having already completed the technical integration process between the application and their health systems.
Residents in the four communities in which it already works can download the application on their mobile phones, which is available in the 'app' stores of Android and iOs systems. Those who live in other communities in which Radar Covid will be implemented soon can also do so.
To date, the application already has about two million downloads in its versions for Android and iOS operating systems.
Trained Armed Forces personnel
During lockdown the Armed Forces played an important role in assisting the regional Governments of the 17 Autonomous Communities to manage the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, and since the state of emergency concluded, training has been underway to provide other services as required should there be a second wave.
2,000 military personnel have been trained as contact tracers and the Prime Minister said that these would be made available to the autonomous communities to work on contact tracing tasks, as required.
The figure can be increased if necessary, the PM said, "those communities that have a lower tracking capacity have this offer from the Government of Spain and the Armed Forces. We could even increase that figure as necessary through the urgent training that we have planned, " said Sánchez.
Members of the Armed Forces will be made available to the regional governments to help them develop tracking techniques, improve the use of digital media to discover new positives and, above all, strengthen the capacities of the Autonomous Communities to manage the pandemic.
The Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, had already announced at the end of July that the Armed Forces had personnel preparing to support the communities in disinfection tasks, as they did in March and April, and tracking. Last week she again raised this topic when visiting various units to thank the forces for their contribution to date, review the training programmes and ensure that the units were ready to act as required in the coming weeks.
The Prime Minister endorsed the words of Fernando Simón, by stating that the evolution of the pandemic is "worrying" and insisted that the situation is “not the best”, but believes that with additional measures it is possible to get the pandemic under control again, assuring "that this has already been achieved" a few months ago "when the data was worse."
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