ARCHIVED - Radar Covid Tracker App. now operational in the Murcia Region

The App. is now functioning in Andalusia, Cantabria, Aragon, Canary Islands, Extremadura, Castilla y León and the Balearic Islands

More than 2 million people have currently downloaded the app. in Spain and more regions are set to join.

Use of the app. will help to rapidly detect new covid cases and is believed to increase the chances of early detection by up to 30%, so all residents are being urged to download it onto their mobiles.

As the Covid Pandemic progresses, one of the big challenges facing governments is how to limit the economic harm of mass lockdowns and rapidly identifying Covid positives in order to close a tight protective circle around a positive case and their immediate contacts is seen as being an effective means of limiting the spread of the virus.

This of course, depends on the ability of the government to detect a case before symptoms appear and the individual concerned has the opportunity to infect other people, a difficult task given the invisibility of the virus.

Contact tracing is laborious and time-consuming, to say nothing of costly, but the use of mobile applications can greatly reduce the manual labour of contact tracing and rapidly identify a larger number of possible positive cases.

Implementation of a contact tracing system has to be undertaken in line with the creation of compatible Covid testing systems and measures to ensure that those identified as positive comply with the quarantine request; at the moment this is proving difficult, as the economic implications for individuals told to quarantine for 14 days are not always compatible with their personal circumstances and work commitments, hence the ongoing problems of new outbreaks.

Here in Spain, the Spanish Government has supported the development of a Covid Radar Tracker app which is now rolling out across Spain, following successful trials in the Canary Island of La Gomera.

The app was tested between June 29th and July 31st in la Gomera a period in which four waves of fictitious outbreaks of COVID-19 were simulated, allowing the developers to test the way that the app responded to the situation and how it worked from a users point of view.

The app. uses Bluetooth to warn users if they have been within two or three meters of an infected person in the fourteen days prior to a new diagnosis and is designed not to replace manual tracers but to create a complementary tool for manual trackers in order to increase the chances of “catching” cases in the early stages.

It does not use geolocation or collect any data from users, but assigns random numbers to the mobile phones of those who voluntarily install it to warn them that they have to contact the health authorities because they have recently been close to an infected individual. In order to maintain anonymity, the individual with whom they have had contact is never identified.

Each individual regional government has to implement the system in its own regional territory and ensure that the contact tracing system is installed within their own regional health service systems.

Each region of Spain runs its own regional health service, so although the national Government can recommend its use, it can´t force a regional Government to implement the service.

Each region will have to provide a code to those choosing to download the app. allowing them to notify the close contacts with whom they have interacted in recent days so that a message can be sent to contact the corresponding health authority for a test.

The regions will also have to provide the phone system and numbers so that participants can contact their local health authority.

Currently, the European Commission is developing the legal and technical framework that makes interoperability between applications based on the decentralized model possible, such as RadarCOVID, so that they can continue to function beyond the borders of each State. The Spanish Government has defended an interoperable model from the outset to expand the scope of this type of tool.

The application can be downloaded for free in the App Store (iOS / iPhone) and Google Play (Android) by following a few simple steps. For iOS it is necessary to have version 13.5 or upwards on an iPhone.